Emerging From The Dark Night

Angel wings

November 21, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

Angel wings

Embrace me in the blue flame

Of healing

When my heart is sore

And body reeling from despair

Remain with me and draw me closer to the light

God knows the confusion of this world

Is difficult to bear

And at times the healing balm we most need

Rests in the life of another world

Beyond our own

Then it is I lift my heart in prayer

And open my soul

To feel your powerful presence here

As you enfold me in

Your wings of love

Healing my pain

Bestowing heavenly blessings

Upon me from above

Afire love

November 21, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

This track by Ed Sheeren always moves me touching so deeply on the theme of grief for his grandfather. I never got to know my father’s father, he died when my Dad was only 12 and similarly, Mum lost her father at age 7 in 1941, but my Nana remarried a lovely English man the family affectionately called ‘Poppa’ and Poppa got ill with cancer when I was only a baby and the family took me to the hospital to sit on his bed. My own father died in 1985 at the age of 64 so this song encapsulates for me all of those feelings, I do not remember his funeral much at all, it was a blur and I left for the UK a month or so later after my boyfriend broke it off with me. We were meant to be travelling together. I left for the UK alone and had many adventures and wilderness experiences there battling all my unresolved emotions. Listening to this song is always cathartic for me.

On a dream

November 21, 2019November 21, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

On a dream you whispered my name

And flew your promises like birds of love

Into my chest

But here inside I hear

Only this cacophany

As lies fight with truth

And I wrestle inside my prison

Thinking of how it drew this to me

Surely there is a way to make a change

But everywhere I look the world is running on

As the wisdom of silence is lost

Then I seek only to be still

Never forgetting the longing I felt

For the sweetness of companionship

And yet here

There is still

Some kind of love

Here

There is still

Some kind of peace

Found deep within

The heart of an aloneness

That restores my soul to connection

With everything

Down in flames

November 21, 2019November 21, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

Sometimes there is only this

A deep pool of sadness and suffering

That feels it will entirely obliterate the landscape

A grief wells when I feel your distance

And how unreachable you are

I keep trying to connect

Even though you are behind glass

And wonder when the last time will be

While memories of her final days

Play over inside of my mind

I could not stay when the drugs took her spirit away

And so I left

Waiting for the news

At the side of her bed

You called me a loose cannon

Because I dared to confront the truth

Knowing it would be my fate to be silenced

So now if my head at times feels like it will explode

You will never know the why and how of it

And I realise there is no point

In holding onto this suffering

Over all that I was powerless to change

And while the world outside my window burns

I cry for the planet

And wonder if we are ever really going to wake

Or will it all

Just go down in flamces

Witness

November 20, 2019November 20, 2019 emergingfromthedarknight4 Comments

Can your heart love

Despite the pain

Can it reach beyond its silent refrain

Of loneliness

And where is the brace that shackles you

To this

A life where only hollowness

Lies at the centre

In your voice I hear a thousand things

You cannot say

You swallowed them when forces made you

Silent

Why consent now to this

A straight jacked that was never right for you

It was only fear of vital life that made them do it

But surely there comes a time

To be larger than this

To reach for expanses of love

Which are there

When you ask

Only to be

Their witness

The Gift

November 20, 2019 emergingfromthedarknight1 Comment

Peace in nature. A beautiful poem by a talented poet.

Ivor.Plumber/Poet

Greed is a hearts bad seed

Encouraging an unnatural need

‘Twas my psyches, unrequited branch

That I left at the devils ranch

Now, there’s no more regrets for me

I’m almost home, I’m almost free

Tomorrow I’ll climb, another tree

With the gift of nature, we flew, we dared

And life’s promises and dreams, went undeclared

Upon her final Autumn, a tapestry of golden threads

Ivor Steven (c) Nov 2019

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Born for love

November 20, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

If we were born for love, how sad that so many of us lose the way. We get taught to shut down on our pain, we get versed in the language of denial and in the mechanical age it seems as though the soul at times had to be put entirely away. I was moved in watching the film Fisherman’s Friends on the weekend in the scene where one of the characters sings a most moving ballad or lament of a sea fisher’s widow for her love lost in high seas, it made me realise what harsh conditions so many of our ancestors survived. I know my own great great grandfather had to leave Cornwall when the bottom fell out of the tin mining industry but they were saying in the movie that many fishermen were forced into the tin mines in Cornwall and if you have seen how these hug the edge of precarious cliffs that dot the coast line you will realise what a tough call of a job that was.

There has been a lot of programs too on radio on the subject of the First World War it being the centenary of Armistice day last week. One commentator was saying how the deep pain of loss, devastation and trauma endured is so often glossed over. Shell shock was a more descriptive word for what so many of these very young men suffered and then returned with, in later days we know this kind of trauma by the moniker Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This stress and trauma that is not spoken of or acknowledged cannot be released and it goes mute and often into alcoholism or drug addiction or other kinds of acting out violence. The grief goes silent and changes its form into something ugly.

I didn’t get to see it but the movie Official Secrets aired at the British Film Festival here the other week and it concerned how Blair and Bush lied about the Iraqis having weapons of mass destruction. This was used as an excuse for invasion and a war that ended up killing about 460,000 armed solidiers as well as affecting so many Iraqi people. This war all started on the back of the Saturn Pluto opposition of 2001 and the resolution of this comes when Saturn and Pluto meet again next year in the sign of Capricorn for the first of several conjunctions on the 13th of January. Saturn and Pluto according to Liz Greene concern “purification through suffering and wisdom through the ordeal by fire.” Pluto is both destructor and regenerator. He rules the suffering which awakens the soul. Pluto may be vengeful and jealous when thwarted, more likely to strike out of the wound in the heart than take time to stop and think or feel the hidden grief and frustration that is propelling the violence, but Pluto is also about survival and the fight to be authentic especially when placed in the Saturn ruled sign of Capricorn. Saturn will be in its own sign (and has been since December 2017) Saturn and Pluto are majorly affecting all of those with planets placed in cardinal signs : Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn.

The capacity to grieve and be able to feel the wound without retaliating senselessly or destructively is a difficult one. The struggle to survive may have us killing off certain things. I think deep grief must be strongly related to Saturn and Pluto. Grief is something that entered my own life as a small baby when my beloved Poppa died and everyone was so sad. It came again when my older sister left home and there have been numerous griefs for me over the years. I feel that my addiction was also about unresolved grief that was ancestrally carried.

It might sound weird my great great grandfather Thomas Matts Trudgeon often shares his grief over his lost mother with me. I know what I carry collectively I saw my older sister carry this ancestral burden for most of her life as a Sun and Venus sign Capricorn ruled by Saturn placed in the sign of the mother Cancer in her birthchart. I saw her collapse under the repression, it was a subject that came up around the lunch table yesterday when my sister and I were discussing how Jude so often wanted things and was denied them and would get into a rage. I personally think the ‘manic’ diagnosis is a masculine partriachial driven judgement that has strangled so many of us, especially women seeking to come fully alive under the heavy thumb of masculine repression (and I don’t mean here repression by men per se but also my women who are what Jung called ‘animus’ or perfection bound.)

Today I honour all the feelings of my sisters they could not get validated or respected. I cry for what the deep feminine soul in all of us had endured under the old order of conciousness. I feel so sad for my Dad who tried to hard to escape the pain and deprivation of his past but never could and only ended up trapped inside of it and passing on a difficult legacy I am still trying to get out from under. I think of the tale of the Handless Maiden who is promised to the devil by the father who does not know his daughter stands behind the old mill and how much of that my sister’s and I have lived in our own lives. But it seems to me lately that capacity to grieve and then release all of this is what most affects our capacity for resilience or redemption. Right now the earth is crying out for us and we are crying out in our own ways, surely now we can find new ways to react, surely there are new ways we can learn to meet each other across the divides of heroic wounded ego in order to birth a more compassionate, nature and feminine centred world. What do you think are the chances?

Mercury and the spiral staircase : today’s reflections

November 20, 2019November 20, 2019 emergingfromthedarknightLeave a comment

When I think of the archetypal energy of the planet Mercury that is often associated with the mind, associations, short journeys and perceptions I think of a figure who can travel between the worlds of conscious and unconscious. This Mercury retrograde in Scorpio fragments of memories have broken through the surface of consciousness and bled back through, I am aware that the past it present in a memory, it is never totally behind me and it asks me not to turn my back on it but allow it a place in the totality of my soul. That said there are some other schools of thought. There is a time to put a stop to a memory or a thought that may be hurting us, but some of my favourite words from the Big Book of AA are “we will not regret the past, nor need to turn our back on it.”

Mercury seems to have taken me up and down the spiral staircase of my mind over my long journey of sobriety for many years now, I have noticed the twists in my spine of the long term impact of those two serious accidents. I remember 4 trips back and forward to the UK which is the land of my ancestors and it was interesting because a friend asked me to a movie on Sunday as part of the British Film Festival called Fisherman’s Friends about a group of fisher men who loved to sing sea shanties and other ballads and it was set in Cornwall very close to where my ancestors are buried and in the movie one of the characters says of a local church, ” six generations of my family are buried in that church graveyard”. I know most of my mother’s ancestors are buried in the parish of St Stephen in Brannell and when we saw the movie the Moon was in Cancer in my twelfth house of the collective unconscious and ancestors and I was seeing it with the friend who I travelled with overseas in the year after my father died.

I have found my soul really opening up to very deep emotions over the past few nights. I have been listening to my favourite Bread songs which take me back to the house my father built and died in and I have been remembering the longing I had and how we didn’t get to connect emotionally much at all. He always felt so absent and such a long way from me. And last night I recognised how I longed for and needed my father to see me. Last night I was crying out to Dad just saying ‘please see me”.

I got overcome at lunch yesterday when the subject of my sister’s and my inheritance came up, my brother is executor and he isn’t dealing with anything, he gets so immersed in work he doesn’t seem to realise we need him to deal with things and while sitting there I felt my chest go all tight as silent tears just fell down my cheeks. I can’t change my brother but maybe I need to reach out and say something rather than just simmer in silent hurt and resentment over it, making misjudgements.

Mercury was the journeyer between the worlds. I have had some powerful dreams over this Mercury retrograde. I noticed as the Moon shifted into Leo and my first house the fight to be me and express was hitting the Saturn squashed in repressive influence. I was stuck in the dentists chair for 2 hours on Monday as they hammerer my mouth and the frustration and sense of confinement was enormous and its par for the course as the planet Mars changes signs soon into Scorpio after spending about a month in Libra which is the sign of its detriment so transiting Mars is not only square to my natal Moon Saturn Mars but squaring transiting Uranus which longs for liberation and cut off the testicles of his father Saturn in the Greek myth, something mentioned in the movie Remember Me staring Robert Patterson which I watched for the second time late last week.

It is very interesting to me how movies turn up in our lives around particular times. Thomas Moore says that during the Dark Night Of the Soul books and movies can help us to work through similar emotional themes in our own lives. In that movie the central character is at odds with his father who is so disengaged he is rejecting the younger daughter emotionally. The central character played by Patterson goes in to fight for his sister and wake his father up but he ends up losing his life. I could not help but think of my battles with my older brother after watching it again last week.

I am also fighting with Scott still not to bring him off deployment (even if he is real.) I know why I attracted this situation. But its my own inner masculine and feminine I have to do the work with, I cannot look to an outer relationship to fill up my missing pieces, and I believe that our soul mate comes when we are ready and we go through essential lessons with holding and releasing our ‘stuff’ in the course of most soul mate relationships so whether or not he is real there is something important going on. And I have connected with someone with a very deep spiritual side too over the past 10 days and that relationship is giving me so much in my life. With him I can share my thoughts on individuation and soul growth and we are on a very similar wavelength.

The lunch with my sister and Mum’s best friend went really well yesterday. They listened empathically about my dental trauma and my sister even reached out her hand to me when I started crying about being trapped in the car. My Mum’s friend who accuses me of being too emotional was sharing how she had her own teeth ripped out with plyers and she was not allowed to cry with her mother or even given any comfort. My empathy grew and I saw how it was misplaced to feel hurt by her lack of ability to respond to my emotions when no one had ever done that for her. That said I need my empathic friends.

Mercury goes direct soon. I think I will come of this retrograde with more of my softer emotional available than before. I went through the toughest of things and it all came to a head with those horrendous nose bleeds a few weeks ago but things are shifting for me. I enjoy my moments of reverie and I have missed my blog space over the past week. Here is where I find my spiritual community more than anywhere else out there. One day I hope to meet some of my blogger buddies. Its just a dream I have. For today things look hopeful and bright even though this time of year is so often fraught with sad memories. Today I am grateful for all of the life I have lived, even those things that hurt me and I cannot change but all played a part in making me the person who I am today.