The Alchemy of the full moon in the dark nights

Or, how to find our way in the dark, when the ground has disappeared...

It has been a while since I have written. I find myself in the depths of an alchemy that is a shaking me apart, tumbling down old ways of being, cracking me open even more fully to my way of loving the world. “Surrender anything that is not me, to become me”, says my Soul. Which means in this iteration, that every sense and semblance of home has been ripped out from underneath me. I enter a threshold of being a Soul nomad, my own heart my true home, of tracking the longing to know where Earth desires me to be. In the dying away and the composting, I am being dreamed by the Ecotone of Desire- the place where my own yearning meets the longing of the world, where both I and the world come most alive…

In the tracking, two things have caught me- I watched Mauri, the documentary by Science and Non-duality, and I was struck by the amount of chanting and singing that are throughout the entire film: healing, asking permission to enter, welcome, listening to the ancestors, remembering the stories, learning from the wild ones, re-membering the land… again and again through song. And I remember my own ancestors saying to me, if you are not singing, we are not talking. When I am out on the land, I feel in my feet, belly and heart, how I am made to walk Earth, barefoot, singing the songs I hear. I feel deeply how the singing of Earth’s music is an essential part of my soul’s work. I am delighted to be co-creating an album of calling songs to soul and to the wilds with Tracey Forest. We will be launching our gofundme very soon with our EP.

The other is, the Holy Death Doulas. This is a gathering of Death Doulas for the Great Dying in order to listen to how Earth is wanting us to respond to these times. I believe we are in the midst of a species wide initiation, in which we must die to the old life and our attachment to modernity. We ask the question: What ritual might be wanting to be co-created by us in order to usher these dying parts of modernity through the birth canal of death, in order for them to become wise and well ancestors. Woah, radical thought- what if the toxic parts of the system ready to die, which, blessed and praised, lovingly permissioned to die and supported through the birth canal of death, might continue to evolve/heal and become wise and well ancestors/guides for us in these times?

Photo by author

In this dying time, my life has been upended and everything I thought were next steps have composted and become loam- rich fertile soil for the new to grow from… I am in the between time now, the liminal of winter and the dreaming. I would so much love to be together at the threshold of the dark nights, the holy days of the still stand of the dark, the womb/tomb of the Holy Dark Beloved we know as winter solstice.

Once Solstice arrives, I will be in the deeps of the dark in ritual and prayer, listening in for the ways Mystery is dreaming me as a Holy Death Doula, a Soul Initiation Guide and a Ritual Singer Storyteller of the old stories and the songs of now. I will be deep in prayer for the future ones, 500 years from now, who might live in an initiated culture of humans, offering the Beauty of their ritual reciprocity to the Holy in the Wild. May my life, and the widening circles of communities of care I am honored to journey with (human and other than human), rooted in Earth and woven through with the ritual movements of the nomadic singers- tracing paths of pilgrimage across the land, bless and co-dream this great pilgrimage of the initiation of humans, taking our place in the psycho-spiritual-ecological Niche we are born as.