Darkness can be seen as a safety zone where the vulnerable can find the deepest shelter.   Such deep and transformative security offers a time-field to process and grow without other eyes watching.  

Yet, we are afraid of the dark.   Our biggest fears are linked to what we have hidden away from our collective and conscious selves: pieces of truth that we cannot afford to bring into the light of day for fear of shattering what the visible world keeps as real and holds as sacred.

When the darkness is welcomed, non-visible ways of knowing are enhanced.   Seen as a refuge and a guide to those who have lost their way, the archetypal feminine darkness, The Woman at the Edge of the World, known by various names such as The Crone, Inanna, Lilith, Kali, Mary Magdalene, and the Black Madonna to name a few, will work in invisible ways on your behalf.   Her power holds us and connects us to channels of knowledge, intuition, and listening to those things we ‘know but don’t know.’   The Winter Solstice is a time-field when the land...the ethers…and the ancestors…catch our attention with the sharpness of cold wind and the sound of our footsteps crossing the night. 

Messages conducted through the darkness supply courage to the traveller alongside the flood of ‘knowing”; the pit in our stomach, the flutter of our heart, the chill to our bones, and the hair standing on end, just to name a few of our most effective non-rational mechanisms of knowing. 

In children’s fables, the heroine’s crisis arrives as an overwhelming labor, a kind of initiation before their next phase of becoming.   As night falls, the heroine falls into a deep state of sleep.   Through that envelope of darkness, sleep, and invisibility, help arrives to complete the task in immaculate fulfilment.

In this pro-darkness context, light does not conquer darkness; rather, darkness births the light.   It follows that death is not the end of life, but rather, supports life.   The Woman at the Edge of the World is both a friend and a mother to all those who value Her. 

Sister to the winter solstice is the darkness of the monthly new moon, a visible reminder that we are continually in cycles of create─and─destroy; create─and─destroy.   Without owning our power to destroy, the soul’s power to create is semi-paralyzed.

Katherine Freese, American Theoretical Astrophysicist, is renown for her work in Dark Matter, Dark Stars, and Dark Energy.   She reports that roughly 85% of all matter in the cosmos is Dark Matter and explains “we spend so much time examining what we can see ─ its like standing under a streetlamp looking for our keys in our purse, cause that’s the only place we can find them.”

I understand her statement to point out that our egos and rational minds require external validation.    Yet, the search within one’s inner abyss, is only between you and Divine Mother.

During this winter solstice, I invite you to stand before the western horizon line after the sun has set, under the ceiling of stars and consider:

What are you processing within the darkly kept Life/Death/Life force?

What is Her force incubating for you within Her intuition, far-seeing eyes, and deeply listening, loyal heart?