When the dark time of year gets here

This is the second Friday in a row I have spent with no agenda.  Today and last week included time on my little square deck that's built into the canyon wall.  I deeply soaked in to the feel of the land around me.  The trees, the exotic green, the breeze out of nowhere then gone again, the happy dance it did on my skin.  The sun, on its fall retreat.

Yesterday my cousin Erin called.  I was on my way to the grocery store in Laguna Woods, where everyone is over 70 and more than once I had to help an oldtimer pick out food or manage what was directly in front of them.  I followed my inner knowing it said cook something golden delicious and fatty for me that's what I so, so need.  Erin laughed, totally understanding and in the same spot.  She lost her mom three months ago.  Her mom Mary was young, a teacher, loved the sea and nature, loved her family and to be active outdoors.  In the last year of Mary's life much of those loves were taken from her--that is she had to give them up.  She raised her head anyways and walked with courage and grace through it all.  These past three months I've tried to do the same.  I've been so grief-struck though I couldn't even comprehend the grief itself.

Erin and I found one another on similar shores last weekend, having both finally stopped the ceaseless running, willing to slow down.  How significant  I thought, same weekend as the time change.  No fighting it a second more, and indeed we talked all last weekend in grateful surrender--we had to enter the season of the dark.  It was time.  My body, yesterday, begged for more of the same.  I cooked the most delicious verde enchiladas.   Baked my cousin Erin in.  Laid on my couch and ate them in front of netflix all night, with black cherry soda and red velvet cookies to wash them down.  I was seized, out of nowhere, by the most rapid tears in the middle of a movie of vignettes about different women.  I let them come out and snuggled deeper on my couch. The rain made fat airy sounds on the concrete from out my window screen .  This, this aloneness, this powerless over life's biggest swings and atrocities, this is why people fear the night.  In my Women Who Run With the Wolves book, since Mary died I've drawn the same thing.  The story about Baba Yaga, and the girl who because of her motherlessness must face the dark, hard sides of life.  Those are her psychic tasks, her work in her own personal inner or under world.  To confront the dark or fearfulness that lay within and gain the ferocity of strength that comes by completing that part.

This is what we do on a spiritual level when the dark time of year gets here.  We look at how we are human, often so connected to what we fear.  Tuesday in the afternoon the moon is new... it is Lunar Samhain, or Lunar New Year.  The dark moon after the final harvest of fall.  When we look if we dare at the kneedeep shit, all that detritus that will grow the new seeds in us through this winter's dark.  My gain and blessings this year have been enormous.  Because this is life: the way of circular, spiraling path, of the balance within of human and holy being kept--my loss and pain have also been profound.  I enter the dark hallow now--we all do.  I bless it all, surrender to the hard with the light and good.  It is not good it is not bad, it is rather the seeds of both from inside the same.  We are where we need to be, right on time.  The end, and also, how to begin.