Sinking Into the Source of Everything

We were all seeds once. Growing from the darkness of soil wombs, we once knew how to wait, take root, sink into the source of everything before emerging into the light of the world.  

I marvel that I once knew how to be that still. A stillness of infinite patience.  My brain has only a logical reconstruction of my time in-utero, but my animal body has a memory of sea turtle consciousness, fish heartbeats under an icy pond, and the amniotic beginnings of us all. 

As we deepen into winter the old knowings of the Water element are coming forward. We are reminded to trust in our heaviness and sink our nervous systems into the black amethyst of cosmic oceans. There is a slippery soulstream waiting in the beneath, flowing below the surface of our winter dreaming. Each night dream represents our brief descent into what depth psychologist, Bill Plotkin, calls “the Great Underdream, a dipping of our toes into the soulstream, a briefing on one or two points about the deeper life waiting and longing to be lived.” 

It is here in the heaviness, the contraction, the contemplation of winter that we slow enough to hear and potentially live the questions of our souls. As German poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it, “ be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”

Gather by the warmth of the woodstove for the latest episode of the Woman Who Rubs the Mountain, where I explore radical introspection, loosening into the uncertainties, and hibernating in the caves of soul questions with death doula Jen Hudziec. Nestle into the delicious, primordial yin with us as we strengthen our spiritual storehouses, allowing the dark gestation of the underworld to feed our expression and future blossoming in the above world. 

And I wanted to take a moment of gratitude to celebrate that Throwing Thunder is a little over one year old now, and has now won three awards, The National Indie Excellence Award, the Indie Reader Award, and it was recently selected from hundreds to win a Best Indie Book Award. Here are a few words from Chapter 7 that feel particularly relevant right now…

“...down below the surface layers, down in the black soil roiling with invisible skeins of microorganisms, down where only scientific listening devices can pick up the subtle vibrations of the oceans swishing and the humming of the globe turning, is where we find the essence of the dark feminine, the deep feminine, that buried feminine aspect of ourselves that cannot be controlled or pared back…The archetype of Wild Gaia wants you to find the confidence that rests here, at the very root of your root. She wants you to plant the seeds of your dreaming, your passions, your loves, deep into the teeming soil at the heart of you and see what will grow in its patient mystery.”

May you settle down into the richness of your dark center,

Kendra

Excerpt from the December 2022 newsletter.