Instead of mirroring Nature’s slowing down & going within – into ourselves and into the dark soil – the speed at the end of November intensifies – we begin to push our tired selves out there into the world to do and do and do.
And during this particular week, which is even named Black Week, we are ushered to consume, consume, consume.
Black Friday creates an estimated 429,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year in the UK due to transportation and production. That’s the equivalent of 100,000 cars on the road for a year. Go check out the stats for your country.
No matter how many moving words about regeneration or being the change we might proclaim, it is this exact overriding of both our bodies’ and Earth’s needs, that keep us tied to the old paradigm, giving it fuel instead of divesting from it.
An entrapment of unconscious choice, a programming dictated by our colonised minds. A choice that is the result of sharp disconnect. From land, from ancestors, from Nature.
From ourselves.
I know, because I too used to push & drag myself through winter.
Now, my devotion to the dark period is growing stronger by the year.
I have just enjoyed my 5th November living in close relationship with the lands, enveloped in more external darkness than ever before.
The words ‘enjoy’, ‘lands’ and ‘darkness’ are important in this context.
The use of ‘enjoy’ is significant, because November used to be my ‘worst’ month. A time I dreaded each year.
I didn’t ‘like’ the darkness. And I didn’t like how tired I became, how impossible it was for me to keep up to meet the demands and expectations of me at work, at school, at home.
The lack of light made me feel claustrophobic, so did the cold, the storms, the barren landscapes… So I decided I didn’t like November and often dreamed of escaping to a sunny beach far away.
What I didn’t know then was that when we bypass, or avoid, difficult emotions or realities in our lives, we are often unable to let go & engage in deep regeneration, of the kind that Nature invites us to precisely at this time.
But then one day everything shifted.
It shifted not because all of a sudden I began loving winter (I do now though), but because one November 14 years ago, I came face to face with my inner darkness, and began a journey of accepting myself more, which in turn made me feel even more connected with everyone and everything else in life.
When we are frightened of our own inner darkness, we fear it outside of ourselves too.
When we are not connected with our bodies we cannot hear the calls and needs of them. And in turn we cannot hear the calls and needs of land either.
14 years ago I went through a period of stark personal losses, and grieving became a vocation, as Báyò Akómólafé describes this necessary activism of our time. I learnt first hand that saying yes to grief is one of the most powerful, unparalleled, vital and life-giving technologies we are invited to say yes to if we are serious about letting the layers of armour, shame and carefully buried sadness melt away, so that we can thaw out and be here now: with ourselves, each other, with Nature, Earth. Crucially, be present with this moment on the planet.
Without embracing grief, we will, on some level, become stuck in our lives, as mirrored in our collective life as humanity here now.
It is because we don’t grieve that we and the planet burn out.
It is because we don’t grieve that we can’t feel joy.
It is because we don’t grieve that we can’t find the love and intimacy we so desperately seek.
It is because we don’t grieve that we are confused about our purpose in the world.
Facing our own darkness and becoming active grievers, enables us to soften, to open.
Eventually come home to our bodies and who we be underneath all that pain. We have an opportunity to become supple, flexible and develop capacity to tune in.
We likely begin to hear, sense and feel all kinds of things that we previously were not able to, when we lived from our heads up, always on our way somewhere, blocking out our hearts’ wisdom and our bodies’ nudges, ploughing on through, come rain or sunshine, November or July…
Through intentional deep healing work, I gradually came home to my body. This in turn enabled me to hear a whisper, deep inside, to return to my maternal ancestral lands. The whisper became louder and louder and eventually turned into a vision for my future life.
I envisioned myself with the lands. Lands my foremothers and forefathers had worked for countless generations. My body longed to be there. To know the feeling of being an extension of the soil.
To live and die in this way.
5 Novembers ago I arrived. And the months that followed meant that I could do nothing but surrender and let go of any agenda I might have had.
As Nature would have it, my days were filled with shovelling snow, making sure we had food during blizzards, dealing with acute water leakages, fetching fire wood… There was no time for anything else.
Q4 deadlines and producing, and Q1 striving and pushing felt a million miles away – irrelevant – even ridiculous.
Energetically, it felt like make-believe play, made up only in an attempt to make us feel important somehow. All the while the game only makes us feel increasingly like something is missing, and simultaneously bringing us deeper into exhaustion and depletion.
That winter I embraced deep rest until March and let go of any last remnants of the notion of ‘lazy’.
Ever since then, if anyone expects me to ramp up my pace, my availability or to deliver on sharp deadlines at this time, my whole being becomes a NO. Because the Earth’s energy is a NO. And that same energy is alive in me.
No – we are slowing down now.
No – we are turning downwards and inwards now.
No – we are resting now.
No – we are conserving energy now.
No – we are reflecting now.
No – we are sleeping now.
No – we are following our natural rhythm, now.
No – we are dying now.
No – we are being gentle now.
No – we don’t have to do anything else, this is what we are meant to do now.
No
No
No
The dark time is a time for our inner world and for our nest.
For our feminine energy and for our rest.
My Norse ancestors saw the dark time, and especially November, as a special and sacred time – a time of giving thanks and meeting our inner underworld. A time when the fate of the well-being of all was to be decided with the support of the three Goddesses of Fate. Any journey into the dark was simply seen as a journey into what was not yet known. Therefore, this was a time for gathering wisdom and developing our capacity to sense and see clearly, in the dark.
I truly believe that if more of us heard our bodies internal no each November and decided to act on it, the future wellbeing of all might become an increasingly realistic dream to dream.
But it relies on our willingness to slow down and tune in, and enter the dark.
Are you willing?
What ‘shoulds, musts and can’ts’ are holding you back?
More inquiries for these times:
In what ways are you overriding your body’s nudges and needs this season?
What is your relationship like with Nature’s cycles and seasons, especially the dark time?
What is your relationship to land? What would it take to slow down?
** In relentless times we need gentle, de-colonial spaces that meet our hearts’ longings. Join fellow change creators in the Glade, a flexible monthly community membership in the midst of the dense forest of our lives. Find out more here. **
