Embracing Darkness: A Celebration of Ancestral Wisdom and Connection to Nature
I recently participated in a River Blessing at the weir in Malmsbury. I will write more about this in another blog article. During the ceremony we were each asked to say a few words as part our dedication to the moment. One participant, Tara, spoke beautifully from the heart. Later, with Robert MacNaughton. one of the leaders of the ceremony, her words were re-recorded so they could be preserved.
I have kept the flow of her words unedited, in respect to the beautiful stream of consciousness that was channelled through her that day.
“Today we are celebrating winter solstice with the waters in ritual and ceremony. And I felt a deep calling from the darkness, and in particular, the lineage of witches, which have lived, loved and breathed upon this land for centuries. The witches who have worked and learned and been with this land, and all the beings of this land throughout their time here, and the rage and pain of the persecution and the murder, the killing, the drownings, the hangings and the burnings of these people, and that persecution, the deep wounding and severance of our relationship as people to the land, to the beings of the land, the plant beings, the animal beings, to the waters, to the earth, to the air, to the soil, and to all the beings from the other realms. You know, it's been in our isles and in our lands to honour those beings, because we are just one tiny part of the huge variety of life that lives here. We're one tiny point on this massive web of life, and we're so focused on our own self-needs, on anthropomorphic ideas which rip us away from the truth of life, and even in seeking how to come back into connection of that, there's this ideal of perfection, there's this ideal of going to the light, and sainthood and virtue, and peace and love and light and blessings, and it's ungrounded and it's not balanced.
There's a reverence and a deep celebration and truth and rawness in the shadow, in the dark, in the ugliness. Winter is the celebration of the crone, of that ugly appearance, but the richness that that carries, the wisdom and the knowledge, and just the truth. There's a truth in the darkness, in the pain, in the anger, because there is so much anger for so many things, and there's ancestral and cultural anger, the anger of our witches being killed and burnt and persecuted, the anger of that relationship being scarred and wounded, anger of how we are mistreating and abusing our waters and our lands, anger from the other beings of how we have treated them, and their pain and frustration at the change of relationship. And in embracing that anger and that pain, and just allowing it to be, we surrender into the web of life, into truth, not trying to seek some perfection, which is again another Christian ideal that was imposed upon us but is severing us from the truth of our hearts, and just the truth of life, which is all about balance. And it's beautiful to embrace that balance at this time, the darkest day of the year, to nurture that dark, that place of dream, of germination.
All life starts in the darkness, we are brought from the darkness into the light, and to dishonour that darkness is to dishonour our first experience of life. It's again another dishonouring of the mother, of the feminine, which again has been put so much wounding and just untruth upon. And to embrace all of that with love, and again in this time of year is the realm of Gwyn ap Nudd, the Fae King, the King of the Other Realm, again sacred to these lands, and again not acknowledged in the full spectrum of what it is to honour those beings at this time, the Fairy Realms, the Shining Ones, the Elves, the Gnomes, the Sylphs, the Undines, even the Goblins and the Gremlins, and the beings that we don't like, or have malignant nature, or are just completely neutral or unconcerned with us, they have as much right to life and to be here as we do. And if we can respect beings that want nothing to do with us and we want nothing to do with them, then we can respect those that we love, we can respect ourselves, it means we have greater opportunity and capacity to be in harmony, true harmony, with life around, not harmony trying to seek light and perfection, but harmony of, there is going to be some discord in our, what we label as negative emotions, shame and guilt and fear and anger again, but it's that the harmony of life is knowing that it's this huge array and that all is to be felt and acknowledged, and if we can do that, then we can truly create healing, we can create a better life for all, a better life for the water and all the beings of the water, we can truly give gratitude with understanding, not just with, again, a mental ideal that we're trying to put on, but with our hearts and with our pain and with all of us, just with truth, we're able to give with truth and be with truth, and what is the point of anything if we're not just trying to come and be with truth?
And darkness is a great place to start with truth because you can't see anything, so you feel, you have to feel and know and trust and surrender, and when you can embrace that without seeing a guiding way, but knowing that it's there, feeling that it's there and just moving into it, then we can move into the earth that we want to build, where we treat with respect and we grow, we come from the dream time into the sunshine, into the light, into the nurture, acknowledging both and the sanctity of both.”
Tara