I met Rain online through Laura. She started following along on my fanpage for my photography and left me the most heartfelt comments and was always so encouraging to me. When we finally started chatting one to one on facebook I fell in love. Her soul is so pure and honest. Her words are like sweet honey dripping from her tongue.

This savage season of the waxing moon, she tears me apart right now. Her keening darkness, light-edged and yet oh-so-dark, casts shadows on my “wild gypsy energy that refuses to be tamed,” as Marion Woodman puts it, and those shadows are the shape of my bones.

My darkness wakes with me. She isn't underworld darkness but otherworld, a womb-shaped mystery. I didn't know it would happen like this, with my own awakening, and I’ve resisted going there until now. Things have changed so much this year and I feel raw and vulnerable, especially when I'm not sure I like or want what I see. Recently, in sacred heart-to-hearts, with shared secret messages and our campfire hair, we talked about vulnerability, my soul sisters and I. Talked about the Vulnerable Being, or sitting with discomfort and not trying to make it go away. Not answering pointed questions, not trying to make everyone feel better, not explaining. Not defending, debating, or smoothing over. Not running away, but Being in that vulnerable space of awkwardness, of tenderness and tension, of knowing something's not okay and letting it be anyway. And letting life happen.

I'm trying to do that with my darkness. To sit with her, to let her move gracefully about the earth of me. For me, not surrendering, not letting my dark waves rise and soak me means that I get bitchy and off-course and fidgety and distrusting. I want to push everyone out of my house and slam the door. I want to turn out all the lights except for the faint red glow from the tip of my incense, and soak myself in the dark. Sometimes that’s the best place to breathe. It feels like I’m watering my bones. A whole garden of them.
I watched this documentary again today, Dancing in the Flames, with Marion Woodman and Andrew Harvey. I cried all the way through. And I wrote their words in my journal:

M: It had those exaggerated poles, because of being a minister's daughter with a highly, highly developed spiritual yearning and on the other side, this wild gypsy energy that refused to be tamed.

A: And your whole life became, then, the search to honor both in their own terms, and to bring them together in a mystery of presence.

M: ... if the gypsy dies, I die. That energy has to be continually given the chance to speak, to dance; it has to be expressed or it is a killer. There's a rage in it.

That's what darkness means to me. And light, too. My life purpose is to embody them in a mystery of presence. I am the wild and free gypsy spirit who dances for her very life, who prays with her whole body, and who lays her bones along the edges of the moon.

rain ::

sacred becomes you.

: the sacred life :