Welcoming Spring: The Queen Of The UnderWorld’s Wisdom For Rebirth
Photo by Lisa Reagan
“It is no accident that the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, is the goddess who brings us the rebirth and light of spring. She knows our personal hells, shadow realms, and unattended visions. She also knows how these energies are transmuted in the dark of winter in preparation for the return to the light.
“But what did we fashion in the dark?”
“We are also talking about sainthood in the original meaning of the word – a full-blooded embracing of our own humanity, not a one-sided goodness that has no vitality or life.” – Owning Your Own Shadow, Robert A. Johnson
From the March 2021 Kindred Newsletter which you can read here.
Dear Kindred Reader,
How are we holding our balance this month? The Spring Equinox balances for a moment the deep sleep of winter and pauses before unfolding its dream of spring, summer, and the full return of the light. What we have fashioned in the dark, will now be brought to light, so our ancient matriarchal rites and mythologies of spring tell us.
What did we fashion in the dark of winter? Did we embrace our shadow selves and lucidly dream a healthy, whole vision for ourselves and our world? Or did we allow our unfocused attention to be riveted and populated by cultural attention merchants? It is no accident that, mythologically, spring is brought to us courtesy of the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone. She knows well our personal hells, shadow realms, and unattended visions. She also knows how these energies are transmuted in the dark of winter in preparation for a return to the light.
But what did we fashion in the dark? What do we bring with us into the light?
Collectively, our human family continues to emerge from a thousands-year-old sleep that finds some of us in shock from our lack of self-knowledge that we were dreaming in darkness, entranced, in bondage. There is a moment in this struggle of suspended belief and disbelief, as Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl says, when we pause and decide to awake, or not: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
While Westerners barely recognize the wisdom-bearing goddess tales of spring, many of us are celebrating the season’s promise of liberation from slavery, as Passover, and Ostara/Easter, the original Pagan celebration of rebirth, now the Christian holy day of Easter, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I have found in my own struggle to awaken and move into light-filled spaces many allies, and many are not human. A childhood ritual of lying on the still cold earth in early spring, giving myself over to the tiny wildflowers carpeting Virginia hillsides, and un-treated lawns, is a dependable ceremony of full-being, somatic remembering and awakening. As a child, this nature-assisted awakening felt lightening quick and joyful. As an adult, the process can take longer, and more skills are needed. For example, after a year of quarantine, America’s slide into fascism, and climate change policy-paralysis – all shadow sides of America’s neglected psyche coming to light – my lifelong spring rite of awakening to joy lying in a patch of cheerful wildflowers at first feels like slogging through a cold bog in a dark wood. According to my friends and family, and research, this numbness is not unique this spring.
As Stephanie Mines writes in her book, We Are All In Shock (reviewed below by Darcia Narveaz), if we chose to participate in our own and humanity’s transformation as a year-round conscious rite of liberation and rebirth, it is time to learn the difference between shock and trauma, to recognize when we are in a sympathetic or parasympathetic state of shock, and to develop our grown-up skills for self-healing.
As Rhea Kormarek shares with us in her podcast interview this month, tending to our somatic states has the powerful capacity to shift our worldview, to move us out of entracement or shock and into awareness. Rhea shares her personal story of moving through injury and “panic states” when trying to approach her body, and discovering the neurobiological roots of her body’s responses.
In this month’s consciously-curated collection for you, we’ve also included the self-nurturing tool, the Eco Attachment Dance, pioneered by Darcia Narvaez and her students to help us restore our nature connection for self-healing in a delightful 28 day process.
This historic moment, between waking and sleep, dark and light, evolution and extinction, we find ourselves participating in a what some days seems like a hellscape vision. But an underworld goddess, who watched humanity fashion and reject its shadow creations for millennia, knows what is coming to light now – with its boot on the neck of a dying man calling for his mother – is coming home to be healed, to be liberated from its dark roots, and intentionally refashioned, rebirthed, through love.
What are your personal rituals to support your desire to work with our bodies and minds to fashion the consciousness, and world, we want to experience? If you would like to join us in our new, and still experimental, Kindred World social media platform and app through Mighty Networks, you can request to join our Eco Attachment Dance community here. We will be extending more invitations to join us at our new Mighty Networks platform in the coming weeks and months.
Happy Spring Awakening,
Editor, Kindred
From the March 2021 Kindred Newsletter which you can read here.
