Element of WATER

GESTATION, THE NURSERY

Season of Winter: November 6-February 4
"Go with the Flow"
Change
Potential

The Longest Night of the Year. The winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. Following the stillpoint,which is exactly 11:30pm CST,the days begin to grow longer and the nights shorter.

Winter solstice is the longest night of the year. It is the climax of darkness - the least amount of light, the greatest amount of dark. As a species, the dark holds many fears. We are afraid of what we cannot see; even more, we are afraid of what we imagine. The monsters in our imagination come to life in the darkness, and when we fear our own selves, and mistrust our actions, we give birth to the things we fear most. The darkness is a highly potent space in which whatever we are focused upon (our conscious focus) or whatever we are denying (our subconscious focus) is given life. Before the days of harnessing first fire, then electricity, the night was a place to avoid, a place where superstition and imagination came together to titillate us and keep us in communal spaces for safety. The fear pulled us into the moment, making us hyper-aware of our environment, and bringing our consciousness into full coherence. We felt our hearts pound. Our hearing became acute, our eyesight encompassing a broader range of wavelengths. We FELT ourselves in our world, felt what being alive was about and because we walked with our fear of death, we understood the value and glory of being alive right here and now. Life was revered when death and darkness were our companions.

The industrial revolution brought many things, foremost among them an arrogance to conquer nature. Our deeply embedded imprints around our fear of the dark created ways to kill the dark - lighting up more and more of the world. We felt safe when we had light around us. Light represented safety, and truth, and protection. Our religious language was scattered with references to the superiority of the light. The lighter your skin, the more privilege you had. Darkness, blackness, night - all were judged inferior and something to avoid. We believed that if we could see it in the light of day, it could not hurt us. More and more of the darkness has been sacrificed to our fear, yet rather than diminishing the monsters, they seem to be getting bigger. Something appears to be feeding the evil which hides in the darkness.

Charles Eisenstein says, "The quest to create a better world through conquering evil lies at the heart of civilization as we know it. Originating in the earliest agricultural civilizations, the concept of evil first applied to weeds, wolves, locusts, hail storms, and other natural phenomena that were, before agriculture, merely parts of an interdependent whole, and not the enemies of mankind.

In the ensuing millennia, the War Against Evil developed in tandem with technology and religion. The conquest of nature extended into the internal realms and became a struggle for self-mastery, self-control, and the transcendence of the flesh. It extended into the social realm as programs of social engineering that sought to eliminate evil on a mass scale. Taken to its extreme, it took the form of purges, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism. In other words, the elimination of evil lends itself to the very same dominator mindset that is part of the problem".

We equate evil with darkness. Yet it is only in the deepest and darkest space that birth is possible. All our ideas are formed in the darkness, and only upon their birth do they come into the light. We repeat this every second somewhere on this planet - someone is giving birth to a new baby, or some idea is being birthed, but the gestation of all things both real and imagined begin in the darkness. And that is also where they all end - the light at the end of our lives fades to black, and the credits roll.

When I built my cabin, I loved walking at night, especially in the winter. I lived on a mile and a half loop off any main roads, so could walk at night with my dogs and enjoy the sky. The stars in the winter were breathtaking - many nights as I numbly walked in below zero weather, a part of me was thinking, "what the hell are you doing out here? You should be home where it's warm!" Yet I could not take my eyes off the sky. The force of the stars as they looked at me looking at them kept me mesmerized, and I was grateful I could walk down the middle of the road and not pay attention to my feet, as my head was up and my eyes riveted. Then someone from Texas bought a cabin down the road, and although they were only there about a month out of the year, they decided they should have a gazillion-watt yard light blazing at all times. It ruined my nightly walks - walking toward the cabin was painful to my eyes which were opened to starlight, and walking away from it I could feel the backwash in my peripheral vision. I could not understand how someone who wasn't even there could kill the darkness in this way. (It was, in my opinion, a beacon to robbers, saying "here is an unprotected property, come steal something!)

And really, it is so much about killing the darkness. At some basic level, we all understand that we are giving birth to something in the darkness, and I think we are aware that what we are birthing may often not be our highest choice. Rather than look within to the monsters in our imagination, we seek them outside, to blame and make war. It is the message behind so many things - commercials about sickness, or "pests", or "weeds" - all these messages are "KILL THE THINGS THAT CAUSE DISCOMFORT!!" The darkness is blamed for our own inner demons, rather than seen for what it truly is - the medium in which we gestate our inner world, then birth it into the world outside of us.

Light reveals what is hidden in the darkness, one reason we seek enlightenment. Yet the purpose of enlightenment is not to banish darkness; rather, it is to reveal what monsters we harbor within - what fears we carry such deep judgments about they cloud our vision - and to transform these monsters with love and compassion and restore the darkness to its sacred nursery. The deep velvet blackness is where we go to heal our traumas and wounds, and without that restoration and rejuvenation, we age quickly and life can become hard and quietly desperate. When we seek out the night to heal with respect and awe, transformation is immediate and delicious.

So I invite you to join me this Solstice and look deep within yourself to find what you are most afraid of. If you cannot find it and identify it inside, it will most likely make itself known to you outside. Rather than hold your outside accountable for these demons, make peace with them and transform your world. The best way I know how to do this is just start a list that begins, "My fear says", and then write whatever comes up for you. The more you do this exercise, the more you will know about your inner world. Simply moving that fear from the darkness of your subconscious to the light of your conscious mind will defuse the power fear carries, and begin a transformation. When you can spot your inner demons while they are still stalking the inner darkness, they rarely appear outside in your world.

The darkness is necessary to magnetize all life. Gardens that have light 24/7 due to street or yard lights will not have the same strength and vitality as gardens that get to sleep. It is the same for humans. Without pure darkness, your cortisol levels do not recede while you sleep, leaving the body stressed, often for years. This deficiency of magnetism then drains our vitality and passion, and we may well find ourselves in a healing crisis. Embrace the darkness within AND without, and maybe on this longest night of the year, take yourself out to the darkness and stare at the stars. You just never know what might be staring back!!