We are seeing dark energies at work everywhere in the world and many are feeling them more intensely than ever in their own beings, their own hearts and minds.
Understand that these dark energies are active not only in certain countries or groups, or working through certain individuals. They have accumulated across the earth from all the darkness that we - people- have allowed to accumulate and grow in us, often because we insist on accepting only light, goodness and love. It is easy to point at others, but if we pay attention, we may feel those energies shifting in us right now, intensifying or perhaps fighting to maintain their hold over our thinking, and it can feel very distressing, very intense. This is the darkness of humankind's collective shadow, that will continue to accumulate until we learn to bring more of our personal shadows, our own inner darkness into consciousness where it can, if we are willing, be integrated. And to do that, we must learn to recognise the gift hidden in our darkness, the gift of awakening, of becoming more conscious.
I used to be afraid of chaos, of the darkness that sometimes feels as thick, as heavy, as sticky as deep mud, forgetting that black mud can also generate life.
Earth diver myths around the world tell us this, many where a special animal dives into the depths and brings up mud from which the world is created, or a creator god like the Egyptian Khnum who emerges from the mud and creates the world from the primal mud, or like the Titan Prometheus or Jehovah, who create humankind from clay.
This really came home to me recently in a flash of insight when I knew, just knew that chaos, inner darkness, despair have always felt to me like mud ... the earthy half-rotten smell of it, the squishiness, the fear of being sucked in. The smell of it filled my nose, that familiar background smell of my personal, deeply felt darkness.
and in the flash, I clearly saw myself drawing from that darkness the threads from which I had woven my life - childhood experiences, my life stories, dreams and nightmares, my shifting sense of Me, moments of transcendence - I had woven them all from roots, tangles, thin seedlings, sometimes faint, fine threads of gold found in that sludge.
What then felt like chaos, like anguish or death, I realised, was and is the blackness of moist deep earth from which all things come. It doesn't sound like much, but it was an immense, a profound knowing that has change everything for me.
That's what the earth diver and other myths of being created from dust, from clay, for mud were telling me all along, that as Creatures of the Earth, we are destined to plant our feet in its mud and take strong root there, and to find our way towards the light. Like the sacred lotus, we are meant to be nourished by darkness, to rise and bloom, like the tree to be held steady by the roots as we raise our branches high into the air to shimmer, blossom and fruit there.
It is in darkness we can find our greatest strength, Psychologist Robert Johnson* says, that we can find the power and wisdom to fully and consciously spread light in the world. We find the gold in our inner darkness, and bring it into the world.
*Robert Johnson, Inner Gold.