Down Down Into The Dark

A Samhain Metamorphosis

I write this on Samhain. The light is grey and still like stone, the only movement and colour the slow weep of yellow leaves falling perpetually, one by one, as if the trees will never be empty. The night’s moon will be dark. This day is not a held breath, it is no breath at all.

Welcome to the Celtic new year.

There is power in this time, but it takes courage to seize it. It means finding that part of yourself that has been breathing hard and fast, the part of you that is always trying to out run and out pace something, that is always desperate to move and push away, and it means gently and firmly holding that part of you still while it struggles and fights. It means slowly, slowly letting all breath and panic fall away from it until there’s no breath left, until there is only silence and the thump thump thump of your own heartbeat, while you wait and see what happens next.

Until something cracks open.

If you can find your way here then, perhaps, you will have a chance to see yourself clearly. It might well be the only true time of the year that you can. 

It is on this day, with this power, that I look at myself.

I hover in the grey air without breath, unmade, and I observe what’s really happening.

I have been bewildered by my life again lately. There have been times of grief, disappointment, frustration and fear over my illness and my circumstances, and a numb kind of wondering why I end up battling with the same questions time and time again. Why am I in so much pain? Why do I find it so hard to do the things I want to do? Why can’t I be better than I am? What do I need to be OK?

I began my day with a plan to fix it all, the same way I always do. The problem with plans is that they exist as something separate, unrooted from any reality. They are ghosts held together with desire and willpower and ambition, wrapped around themselves tight like string. We pour belief into them, all our ideas of happiness and rightness — this will make me happy, this is the right way, this is the only way that things can be OK — until this apparition we have conjured begins to look and feel more convincing and true than anything else around you. But all a plan can do, really, is hover around you, haunt you, distract you, taunt you, disconnected as it is from blood and bone, from this moment, and this one, and this one. Maybe we can force reality to bend to our will for a time, but rarely for long. Life has a way of pushing back.

Meanwhile, there is your real life. 

Meanwhile, there is my real life. 

I don’t know why the veil slipped this week — perhaps it really has been something to do with the magic of the season or perhaps I’ve simply been very tired — but in the still, frightening pause of Samhain, I’ve been able to see it: what my life really is. Not for the first time or the last but clearly, how real life is a constant flow and push and pull of changing energy. 

I see how this energy moves outside of me, manifest in the ups and downs of my life that I have little control over, in the way other people move and hurt and want, in all the ways they struggle and nudge up against me, in all the ways they can’t be predicted or steered. I see it in the vast, complex web of cause and effect that we are all, always, caught in. I see it in the way our days can be shaped by pebbles of choice and behaviour — ours and other people’s — that began their slow tumble down time’s mountain long, long ago, landing with delight or with horror right now seemingly, inexplicably out of nowhere, but that were inevitable as gravity. 

And I see, too, the way this energy moves inside me — the way it is me — although I may call it other names: pain, mood, joy, thought, fatigue, desire, fear, illness, wellness, emotion. I am as wild and changeable as the weather outside. Wilder. The truth is that my own currents disrupt me more often than anything else.

To hold myself down in the still darkness, in the slowing thump thump of Samhain’s pause, is to see a deeper truth: this reality leaves me profoundly afraid. It always has. It leaves me keening. I don’t want the chaos, I want the plan, I want to be in charge and I still spend much of my time playing a desperate game of make-believe where I convince myself that I can make it all go my way after all if I just try this. I don’t like the truth about life revealed in Samhain’s clarity. I want to push it far away.

Hovering outside myself, seeing this, is to feel a profound compassion. For me, for all of us. No wonder we suffer so much.

We can read about the truth of impermanence until the cows come home, but still, deep down, we believe we could be the exception and get to hold onto the things we want if we only do the right things. We can read about interconnectedness but still get irritated when someone else’s story interferes with or usurps our own. We tell ourselves that the status quo we deserve, that we should expect and aim for is unchallenged peace, or at least most of the time. We imagine our home base should be undisturbance: it is anything and everything going our way and letting us do and have exactly what we want. In our secret hearts, we want our story to be separate from the story of the world and the other people who live in it, or at least more important than theirs. Let’s face it, we do.

Through Samhain’s eyes I see it: basing a dream, a life, a plan, your sense of security on this illusion is madness. The normal state of things is disruption — not just sometimes, but all the time. The normal state of things is FLOW. The normal state of things is surprise. The unchallenged, separate, static life that we imagine simply does not exist: we are basing our expectations and desires on an impossibility. Its very idea runs completely contrary to the nature of life itself and to imagine things differently can only ever be a trick of privilege, stubbornness and self-destruction.

So, says a voice. So what now? Are you going to spend another year fighting? Another decade? Are you going to keep pretending, resenting, complaining, or is there, perhaps another way? Another path you could choose? Another way you could be?

Down down into Samhain’s darkness I fall.

It’s time, I think, to be remade again.

I turn a Tarot card and Judgement turns its face to me — the card of resurrection, of metamorphosis, of responding to the call. Because that is the thing about everything always changing, isn’t it? We can change too.

Identity is a precarious, unpredictable thing — claim one and you’re as likely to find yourself in a new prison as you are a new playground — but deciding on a new identity remains the only true way to change your life. The most dangerous, powerful spell in the world is the one that begins I AM... Combine it with another spell — WHAT IF — and you can have a revolution on your hands. So let’s try it.

What if.. I am.. a being — no, a witch — whose work, whose whole purpose, is to feel and notice the shifting energies of each moment and to welcome that energy and to embrace it? The changing energy outside of me. The changing energy within.

And what if my path is not to try and control or prevent that change, but to be a free-flowing open conduit for all of life’s energies to pass through as I feel it and record it? Shape it? Direct it? — into words, into pictures. Word witch. Picture witch. What if every time something unexpected or surprising happened I was to feel delighted! Ah, energy moving, excellent: this is when things get interesting. This is when my work begins, even if it feels horrible, perhaps especially then. This is when I get to notice all the things that are crying out to be noticed and examined. This is when I’m fed with what I need to learn. What if the whole reason I’m alive is to embrace this opportunity to see and study and express life as it really is and to love it just like that? Witch of love. Witch of care. A wild-haired, ageing woman who raises her arms lovingly to the storm.

And what if the world was terrifying and wild and beautiful and I was to embrace that truth in every moment? And what if I was to approach it all without seriousness and self-pity, doom or gloom, but with tenderness, playfulness, mischief and courage? What if I was to have more faith and trust in this calling than any carefully laid plan?

What then?

This sounds good, a voice says, this sounds powerful. But what will you have to give up to lean into this new story? To claim a new identity means you must give up an old one…

I think about this.

I’d have to give up any ideas of speed and force — things would have to happen in their own unfolding time, not according to my will.

I’d have to give up all ideas of linear growth and instead embrace and welcome a far more unpredictable path.

I’d have to give up any ideas of conventional success — this identity may give me money, visibility, work I can sell and that will impress the world, or it may not.

I’d have to give up the idea of a ‘good’ day being one I was in control of and I’d have to give up thinking that I always know best.

I’d have to hold any plans extremely loosely — as nice to have, perhaps, but not the main story.

I’d have to learn some new skills, I think, but also give up the idea that there is some one-stop, all-inclusive guidebook or teacher that will show me exactly what to do. I’d have to make more mistakes then — yes.

I’d have to give up my aversion to the unexpected, choosing instead to welcome it as a friend.

I’d have to get better at and make peace with feeling deeply uncomfortable.

I’d have to let other people be exactly as they are — I’d have to be grateful to them for revealing the exact energy they’re conjuring up in this moment and what it’s teaching me.

I’d have to give up my hope that, one day, I will no longer feel afraid, for this is a path that fear will always stay close to, I suspect.

I’d have to give up the idea that I can only be OK if I’m completely safe.

I’d have to give up the need to ‘get better’.

Could I do it? Can I?

Samhain’s breathless heartbeat holds me in its final hours, slowing, slowing, until it stops too, until there is nothing, and all I’m left with is my most honest answer:

I don’t know… but I’d like to try.

I sleep badly. I wake with a shuddering breath. It’s a new day. Tonight, a sliver of light from the new moon will begin a new turning.

A new year begins. A new self? Let’s see. Let’s see.

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If you’d like a suggestion for a Samhain ritual, I suggest exactly this: craft yourself a new identity. Begin with “WHAT IF I AM…” and just keep writing. See what happens. Then look at this new identity and think about and write about what you might have to give up to claim it. Do you want to answer the call? This exercise is not for the faint-hearted, but you are brave, I think, like me.

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