In these times the Earth and her children are experiencing a fundamental change in relating. The dark goddess pulls us down into the depths of our soul, devouring everything on the verge of death. Dead ideas, dead words, dead weapons, dead pathways: a delicious feast for the dark ones to ravage and transform into the NEW. The new feminine has risen from the core of Changing Mother Earth and demands the sacrifice of the old masculine way of being. We feel it in our hearts and bodies as the past is resurrected and offered up to the Light. But, we revel in our pasts, in our stories. We define ourselves by what has been, so when the dark ones come to eat up our wounds, anger and sadness our Ego screams out “NO! Who am I without my past, who am I without my soul sickness?” We rage against the dark. Denying it. Pushing Light at it to make it stop. And yet all must die and so we finally must give up resistance and find ACCEPTANCE. And in acceptance we mourn for our loss. Those stories and experiences served us so well that we grieve for those parts of ourselves and our community that are ready to release even when a big part of us is SO happy to let go and give up suffering.
The ancients understood this. They honored grief. They invoked the dark goddess at funerals through the wails of keening women, women who gave their bodies over fully to the power of ecstatic release. Notice that word ecstatic, as in ECSTASY: a state of complete connection to the Divine and the BLISS of transformation. Death, Rebirth, Life. It’s all good, it’s all perfect. Every experience is a gift, an opportunity to take our spiritual journey to a new level of evolution. In western culture grief is something we handle in private or people try to help us “get through”, but what if grief was a loud, wailing howl that flowed through the body like the ecstasy of an orgasm? What if we screamed out our grief in great waves until we had nothing left but space, a great void where the new way of being can sprout?
The Old World is dead. Its corpse has big pieces of rotting flesh falling off into a huge compost pile where they can be mulched and then feed the seeds of the New World. Denial of the death of the Old World is rampant. Each person, community and continent has its own timing for acceptance. For those who do see and feel the Old World falling down all around them, it is time to grieve for the gifts that World gave us. It is time to honor the lessons of separation and soul sickness. It is time to dance on the grave of the Old World. The Winter Solstice of 2012 marks the turning of the times, the funeral for the Old World and initiation of the New.
-Veronicah Cohen
The ancients understood this. They honored grief. They invoked the dark goddess at funerals through the wails of keening women, women who gave their bodies over fully to the power of ecstatic release. Notice that word ecstatic, as in ECSTASY: a state of complete connection to the Divine and the BLISS of transformation. Death, Rebirth, Life. It’s all good, it’s all perfect. Every experience is a gift, an opportunity to take our spiritual journey to a new level of evolution. In western culture grief is something we handle in private or people try to help us “get through”, but what if grief was a loud, wailing howl that flowed through the body like the ecstasy of an orgasm? What if we screamed out our grief in great waves until we had nothing left but space, a great void where the new way of being can sprout?
The Old World is dead. Its corpse has big pieces of rotting flesh falling off into a huge compost pile where they can be mulched and then feed the seeds of the New World. Denial of the death of the Old World is rampant. Each person, community and continent has its own timing for acceptance. For those who do see and feel the Old World falling down all around them, it is time to grieve for the gifts that World gave us. It is time to honor the lessons of separation and soul sickness. It is time to dance on the grave of the Old World. The Winter Solstice of 2012 marks the turning of the times, the funeral for the Old World and initiation of the New.
-Veronicah Cohen