04/27/2026
🤍🪷
There are times in our lives when the rug gets pulled out from underneath us - the death of an old dream and how it was all supposed to turn out. What was once so clear becomes incinerated and taken to dust.
The center is lost.
The (very human) tendency is to get out of the death aspect of the archetypal cycle, and as quickly as possible into rebirth. This is so understandable; it hurts to turn toward the dying element.
But there is wisdom, mercy, and grace within the dying itself that we short-circuit if we leave prematurely, before the grief, rage, and despair have been tended. There is a shepherding, a midwifing that is needed, a holding environment for aching and burning to be embodied and known.
Death is always an invitation into a grieving process, where we’re asked to gather the shattered pieces and place them on an altar in front of us. To assemble the broken shards into a special container and enter with them into a portal of mourning.
It’s an act of kindness to slow down, turn off the electronics, unplug for just a bit, touch the earth and ask her (and other seen and unseen ones) for help; and take the time and space and devotion to feel what we’re feeling so that it can be digested and metabolized.
Otherwise, the shattered orphans are sequestered into underground storage, held in the somatic unconscious and nervous system, in our muscles and cell tissue, in a frozen, half-processed, unassimilated form.
From there, they burn, cry, rage, erupt, longing to return home.
If we move too quickly past our grief and onto the next thing, we run the risk of abandoning the grieving one, the heartbroken one, and the enraged one to wander alone in an empty forest. They freeze there, crystallize, and contract in the time machine that is the very essence of relational trauma and wounding. And they reach out to us from inside that soul-place, from that frozen state, in whatever way they can, which we all know at times can be in highly dysregulated, anxious, and panicky ways; for that is the only way they know.
These ones, the longing orphans of psyche and soma, are not obstacles to the path, but are the very path itself. The invitation is to offer ourselves permission, by way of a dispensation deep in the body, cultivating a well-sealed vessel or sanctuary in which the broken pieces can go through the alchemical cycle.
And, in this, we can ask the heart if what it truly wants at this time is to be mended, or if its deepest longing is for something else, cracks in its armor where a certain light can come in and illuminate the broken pieces.
The darker light of the rays of the black sun can only flow when the tears are flowing, when the wound is open and seeping, weeping with its essence.
This grief, heartbreak, shattering, isn’t in need of healing, as it’s not un-whole. It’s perfectly valid and pure on its own, as it is, as a radiant manifestation of a Whole Heart. It’s not waiting to be mended or put back together, but to finally be allowed to share its gifts, its fragrances, its mercy, in new and creative ways.
To speak kindness, to embody compassion, to remember what’s most important to us, and to love this world in ways that haven’t been possible until now.
At some point along the way, we may discover that the inner process of restructuring and falling apart isn’t the expression of some cosmic error or mistake, but of a certain kind of grace.
It’s not easy to embrace this, to see the dissolution, putrefaction, and the alchemical yellowing as the activity of intelligence, of the infinite creativity of Spirit as it unfolds and incarnates itself through matter, body, mind, and soul.
Of course, we prefer our initiatory experiences to come by way of the soft, gentle, and nurturing activity of the Divine Mother, which we can honor and be grateful for when they arise in that way.
In ways the conscious mind isn’t always able to understand, we can also be held by the darkness. There’s a benevolence in the not-knowing and in the disassembling itself. It’s a more wrathful, reorganizing, wild, untamed form of grace, but grace nonetheless.
This level of mercy doesn’t have the maintenance of the status quo as its aim or keeping alive the fantasy that we’re in control of the process of healing and awakening. The fantasy of control is turned to dust.
It’s a grace that is unbounded, undomesticated, and operating outside our own hopes and fears. It’s not part of the intergenerational matrix of trauma and trance, and is never going to conform to how we thought it was all supposed to turn out.
Its role is to cleanse our perception and polish our hearts, which it does with the substance of love.
It can ache and burn as we tend to the unwanted, marginalized, and orphaned aspects of our embodied vulnerability, and to illuminate, liberate, and release the crystallized pieces of soul who have wandered off course and are longing to return home.
The wandering ones – who take up residence deep in the somatic unconscious – are also held, at times, in underground storage, in the shadow, along with the guides of the underworld - Persephone, Hermes, Sophia, and the others, whose role it is to guide us through liminal and transitional times, through the in-between places and into the luminous heart.
