58. Into the Darkness part two

About a week after I started walking the nights, I first met the Shaman. Not on the walks, I might add but actually that's the kind of thing you might have expected.

Her name's Suzi but she really should be called Morgana or something like that. She has long black hair, lives in a real witch's cottage and wears clothes that New Age people try to imitate. She retrieves the parts of your soul that you have hidden through trauma or some other reason and which need to be called back to either help you heal or ensure that a transition is clear.

She doesn't want a lot of back-history before she begins the calling, the song and the drumming as you lie, covered in rugs before the fire, and go on your own internal vision quest, so she doesn't necessarily know in advance what's going on in your life.

Her message for me was that I needed to go into the dark. Right into the heart of the Dark Mother. That's my work in this life; that's where the calling is; that's where the dis-ease is; that's where the healing is. She suggested I spent meditative time in darkness every day.

So we were both pretty pleased that I'd already started doing that with the night walks. And that during the session I had been experiencing a death from another lifetime, being laid out and then cremated on the land, first from within the body and then without it.

The message was very much about the feminine—the Dark Mother is the aspect of the Divine which is concerned with the difficult things; it's the scary part of femininity, the part that is often associated with witchcraft and leads to witch hunts.

If you want an icon, think of Sekhmet, the Egyptian Goddess who destroyed the enemies of Ra (I wrote about her in the London-based weeks). She got so over-enthusiastic about destroying them that she rampaged throughout Egypt and had to be duped and made drunk to stop.

All aspects of Divinity are prone to over-excess (the Greek Gods were almost uniformly, bastards); it's the balancing and the Oneness that brings healing. But to balance yourself, you have to call on opposing aspects which will be part of your healing and they are generally aspects that the false self won't like. It won't like them at all.

Suzi also said that this dis-ease is also the dis-ease of the land. My healing is the land's healing; the land's healing is my healing. The lymph is water; water is the lymph. 

Oh thanks Dartmoor. Thanks a bloody lot. There I am walking your hills and knowing that your bones are my bones and the Dark Mother thinks, 'Aha! We can do a double whammy here. This human wants to be cleared as a channel for Grace. Good-oh.'

So, every time I see or bathe in or drink water I must bless it. I must be the channel of Grace for the healing of water. It would be a one or two-word blessing, a sacred mantra, the Shaman said, and I would already know it. It is the name for me to use alone. Others will use their own sacred name in their own time and place.

I had been given that very phrase, that name of God, by my Bishop in a healing ritual just two days earlier.

Oops, didn't give you a Wanky Bollox warning. But I do think there's something in it. If we are one with God (which we are—we just don't know it/like it/admit it because we live so much in the false self) then we are one with the land. I did find out that lymphoma is very prevalent among farmers and people in the country, probably because of pesticides.

So, as well as the night walks, I began to bathe before bed in the pitch black. Our water comes from a bore hole. The land's dis-ease and I are one. And the healing is one.

I need to be in the darkness to find the darkness in me: all the unacknowledged angers and pains and griefs and all the times I never spoke my truth (or didn't even know my truth) in the face of someone else's need to blame or criticise. And I need to meditate in the darkness, whether it's in the bath in the darkness of the Great Mother's womb or with every footfall down the lanes and across the fields of this land. 

There are nights when I go out and burst into tears and then, as I empty myself, the serenity of the Great Mother fills me. She is the Dark Mother and the Light Mother in unity and she is Nature and she is the moon and the clouds and the starlit sky. She speaks words of wisdom and comfort and she walks hand-in-hand with me along the lanes that are our home.

There are nights when I go out and am filled with angers and I talk out my truth to those who have denied it. I have a voice for the first time and she speaks with me and through me so that I am strengthened and I know that, should it be necessary, I will be able to speak those truths, lovingly, to the people who were concerned.

There are nights when I go out and am filled with fear and terror and then She makes me empty my mind and just go plod, plod, plod until I realise that I am alive now and walking and listening and embraced by the land and able to lift my head to be entranced by the sky or even by the falling rain. She taught me how to do wet, to accept the rain and keep walking, to bless the rain. To be the rain.

There are nights when I go out and am immediately filled with joy, delight and the glorious feeling of oneness with nature.

And there are nights when I just walk and think about the shopping list. Probably those are the best nights of all in a way because I'm just me with a future, dealing with it.

To read more of the story, please click on 'newer post' in black below.

If you are new to this blog and want to start at the beginning, please go to the side bar and click on 'January' to find post no. 1. Thank you.