Emerging through the Dark Night

I sat with you

I held your hand

I kept the all night vigil

While you unleashed an ocean of tears

A flood that almost drowned you

Sucked deep by the tidal pull

Of that underground swell

You held firmly to this place

While all the fears and demons threatened

To unfurl you from this mortal coil

Pulling from every direction

At times they were not even conscious

But the pain was deep

It was the body that wept

Expelling slowly the silted up debris

Of ages

The pain of many generations

Over many years

You were held deep in the silent embrace

Of this house by the sea

Cast adrift

This house was the boat within which you undertook

The perilous night sea journey

Into the unfathomable depths

Of the collective unconscious

Somewhere from deep inside your belly

I hear a child is crying

Longing for its pain and loneliness to be heard

Over how many lifetimes

Was she torn away from her mother

By the fickle restless winds

Of change and fate

Which blew with gale force all round her

Sweeping everything away

From somewhere close

Not too far

The silent witness watched

As death took everything into its mouth

Chewed it round

And digested it

It wasn’t personal

It was just life

Entering its dark phase

The winter before spring

Where the ground of essential being

Seemed to fall fallow

While inwardly new seeds

Were incubating

Through this process

The witness could only hold still
In that shattering place

While everything broke apart

Loosened, dislodged and dissolved

By a greater force

Some higher power

Had its way and begged you

to awaken to a knowing

That could not have come in any other way

But through the dissolution of breakdown

The deeper realisation

So long in dawning

That you were not to blame

For failures that stretched

Such a long way back

And bore painful seeds

That had to germinate slowly

Within the subtle body

Within this hall of mirrors

All turned back to back

You finally saw the truth

And recognised with awe

Where hunger and longing led

To the pain of addiction and promiscuity

Cries of the soul

That arouse out of the unmothered self

Passed down over generations

Whispering from deep within

The rejected body

Now you must hold

And love your rejected being

Back into life

Deeply you feel it

This, the calling to awaken and to understand

The longing to be seen

To be held

To be mirrored

To be cherished

To be nurtured

To hold and to be held

What a terrible storm we endured

Over those 7 years

A storm that had to be weathered

That could not abate

That blew up king tides

There was no other way

But to endure it

But while you were in the midst of it all

The mist and fog swirled around you

It was hard to see ahead

And nothing was clear

Could not be clear

Until the storm and tides did their work

Of changing the psychic landscape

How else could it have been

And yet you longed and longed

With that burning hunger

That could only be understood

And healed through the suffering through

Of those storms and tides

Yet for years you beat yourself up

For whatIn the end

Was not even your fault

So you fell to your knees

And in prayer

Summoned up the witness

Suffering the final defeat

Which led to the ultimate surrender

In this admission of powerlessness

In the crypt

In the arms of this final defeat

Is an unending victory

And though you only sense this

Having reached the end

Through realising ultimately

The fruitlessness of any further action

You surrender completely

And begin to finally grieve

For all that was lost

For what can never be changed or replaced

Such a bitter pill to swallow

It took nearly all your strength

To digest it

Grief was the pain

You coughed up

Over and over

Until recognition came

And now the past is finally being released

In this place by the ocean

Where day by day you suffered such doubt

Something deeper knows

Tormenting voices float away on the breeze

Saying you are nothing

Have nothing,

Mean nothing

This is the voice of the outside world

That sees without depth

That does not value

The essential soul and spiritual deep

Some truths can’t be shared or spoken

Can never be fully understood

By those who fear the depths

Or see them as madness

And in that fearing would cast you out

But that’s okay

Is how it must be

For at the ending

Comes the acceptance

And the reconciliation of everything

And this ending is simultaneously

A new beginning

A new beginning that can only come

After all is stripped away

For so long you were strung

Over an abyss of change so deep

It split you open

Right down the centre

Night after night over many years

You stretched and held yourself still

In the post traumatic burning

While balancing and trying to align

Each energy centre

That ran along the spine

You were twisted

And had to balance

The twin currents

The dual poles of the cadeucus

To birth your wholeness

Out of fractures

Over those years

You dissolved in the ocean

And became the ocean

It was an ocean that you crossed

And the suffering of that crossing

Had to be borne

There could be no holding back

And the fear of extinction had to be confronted.

Don’t hold back out of fear, Deborah

Have the courage to dive fearlessly into that void

Into the undoing

To face the searing emptiness

That scorches flesh from bone

Throw it all into the fire

Submit to burn to dross

All that is not real

Was never real

Allow yourself to be singed

By the fire

That purifies and resolves

Through its burning

All the pain of the past

Then what is essential and timeless

Will be revealed

Let the cords that bind you to the past snap

One by one

Until the tightness and resistance

Passes away

And melts int he open spaciousness of being

All through those years

At the time of darkest despair

You heard the voice of the Goddess saying

You will emerge

From the Dark Night victorious

And see one day

The dawn of a new day

Bright and clear

After the storm of the dark night has passed