I wish sometimes (often) God had given me a lighter more easy path in this world, but then if he or she had then I would not be me for the experiences of trauma and tragedy that have marked my life certainly marked me out for a deeper darker life than a lot of people I grew up with. The thing about trauma and loss is that is permanently marks your soul. I was happy to come across a book which dealt with Goddess archetypes or energies in woman and it the authors spoke of Persephone energy which relates to those of us who encountered darkness, trauma or tragedy when young. I myself was not sexually abused but many Persephone women were. They learned very early on that the world was not a safe place and they could not trust their carers to care for and protect them, and often they were told lies and sworn to secrecy and so they had to keep dark truths locked inside for years.
In my own case the silence I learned to keep came out of realising there really wasn’t anyone emotionally available around me to go to. In our family we had to work hard, always do our best and we were meant to stay silent being excluded if a family dinner was going on where ‘important’ people were being invited. In my own case also because I had a rich inner imaginative life which was not understood by my mother or other family I learned to internalise it and I think this applies to many creative types. If we were lucky we had parents who didn’t interfere too much and let us dream our dreams and write our stories and escape to nature, but some of us were brutalised for it or met misunderstanding from those around us when engaged in such pursuits which made it harder. In my case when I told my father I wanted to go to University and study arts I was told such a degree “was not worth the paper it was written on”. I had my accident at 17 and lost the last term of school and so by the time college came around all I could do was teaching and then when the trauma hit that year with my sisters aneurysm and late psychotic breakdown I was desperate to get away and so I ran up north but quickly got myself in trouble and out of my depth and wanted to come home. Dad then forced me to do a secretarial diploma which I hated and would not let me go back to teaching.
Anyway I learned to fit in as the competent secretary who was always doing the right thing and then to base my life around supporting whatever ‘boss’ I was working for at the time while acting out my darker more creative life on the weekends through addiction and sexual promiscuity, mostly because I was so lonely and had not a clue of an idea of how to authentically bond with and relate to men. Long story short after years of addiction I got sober in 1993 and tried to find my way towards a creative life but by that stage I had been through so many dark night experiences including rape and terminations of pregnancy. And then there was all the trauma taking place with my older sister that I witnessed which showed me that life was really a very dark and dangerous place and you could rely on few people for support.
As a young person and even a young adult all of this kind of thing happens to you without knowing it is happening to you. Its not until later years when you get to wake up that you see the full trajectory of your life. When I got into AA I felt like a failure I had no idea I was just a struggling human trying my best to know my past and find a way to make a brighter future. Low self esteem had dogged me right up until recent years and most particularly in my ongoing therapy with my last therapist Kat (who I have been with for nearly 3 years now) a lot of it has revolved around seeing that self blame was never warranted in my life, was a direct result of being emotionally abandoned and unnurtured for so many years while having undergone such tragedy.
That said the full responsibility of dealing with all of this and creating a creative and happier life, while allowing myself to know and feel the depth of what was lost rests with my adult self as it is only this adult self who can be with the darker self or the abandoned child inside who never really learned to love, care for or parent herself but instead was always looking for someo
ne out side me to do it.
I was thinking this morning about how I always tend to attract others who are Plutoian or Persephone like too. For those who don’t know it was Persephone who was captured by the God Pluto when she was out one day playing in the fields with her mother Earth Goddess Demeter. She reached down to pick a narcissus flower and suddenly the earth ruptured and Pluto appeared kidnapping her and taking her to the Underworld or Hades where she ate the pomegranate fruit. It was only when Demeter set up storms and tempests and raged that Pluto/Hades conceded that Persephone could return to the upper world for half of the year.
And so it is for those of us who are victims of narcissistic injuries or other dark night experiences being unseen or invalidated. I have written about this before.
The dark experiences we have endured with being overpowered or robbed in some way of our soul’s true birthright mark us for dark passages. We may suffer mental illness or traumatic stress which is a burden we bear which makes it impossible for us just to live a so called ‘normal’ life on the surface of things. In our suffering we also may turn to art or poetry or dance to make sense and meaning of it all. We may find ourselves on the outsides of social groups due to the fact we feel different in some way. Inside of us we may hear different music, we may feel the need to dance to a different drum and at this time in history we may identify strongly with animals or with a ravaged planet now suffering so deeply under the weight of the dominant conquest and overpower ethos of the so called ‘masculine heroic’ ethos of the day. Many of us are scapegoats but this scapegoating rather than a sign of something wrong with us may instead be a sign of something right with us if the systems we are being asked to ‘fit into’ are toxic. We may in fact be carrying the rejected feminine part that is wounded and through its wounding and dark night experience will undergo a rebirth which is not only about a personal wound but a collective one as well. Could it just be possible that we went through all of this so that we could birth a new energy, a new world and a new light on earth out of all the darkness?
I am feeling a strong sense of release and renewal since Friday night/Saturday mornings Lunar Eclipse across Leo and Aquarius. We will be having a Solar Eclipse to follow in a few weeks time which occur just a few weeks before Mars which is currently in Aquarius (but will move back into the late degrees of Capricorn) stations to turn direct again on 27th August. A lunar eclipse conjunct the South Node and Mars represents a rising up of shadow material in order to it to be seen and cleared before the coming New Moon Solar Eclipse in Leo. I myself think fear is playing a huge part in what is being witnessed and cleansed. I had a dream about a snake in my house on Saturday night. I was trying to protect my dog from the snake and to me my dog always represents the most instinctual spiritual part of me both in life and in dreams. My own dog Jasper often seems to carry or represent my inner child energy which was so repressed growing up, energy that was full of light, life, exuberance and joy. I know in my own life how fear of being and looking ‘silly’ or ‘out of control’ has repressed me and kept my life small. I think the dreams was an important one and not to be taken literally. But dreams too are part of our dark night gifts, yes they may summon up our fears but we need to reach deeper and if we are feeling scared during this eclipse season by our dreams, rather than turn away, resist or run or allow our fear to dominate us, maybe instead we need to turn around, do an about face and have the courage to look them and our fears in the eye and ask what the message is, where we need to seek liberation or find a deeper awareness or insight into our lives, inner world and psyche. And where we fear taking action or see that the way we go about taking action does not work can we find the courage and creativity to find new ways of going about things, a shift in perspective to cut our fears down to right size rather than have them totally dominate our consciousness and keep us trapped? For what it is worth these are just some insights and thoughts that came to me this morning as I basked in the golden healing light of the Sun drawing comfort and warmth from it.
Emerging From The Dark Night 