On dark days & false gods

This is always the most culturally curious time of year of me.

We are in the dark and holy days, all of nature is conspiring to pull us inwards, to attend to the unseen and subtle dimensions, and yet modernity has designed this time to be the most accelerated, most manically social, most avoidant and dissociative, and most desperately consumerist. 

Perhaps it is that way by design. People retracting into candlelight and finding god in their bodies in the nothingness of darkness and fire and prayer, does not make for “good” business. But in the indoctrination of capitalism, and flash black friday, cyber monday hysteria, and endless emails with hour glass countdowns designed to generate fomo and urgency -

let your rebellion be infused with slowness and with tenderness.

This is ripe time for slow walks, evenings in front of a fireplace, reading actual books, especially myth and fiction stories to bring us into the imaginal realms, for journalling by candlelight, for playing chess and savoring a puerh tea slowly, or your best red wine.

The long nights are for poetry and slow dancing…

This is such precious time of nothingness. And there is so much wisdom in it creatively. Everything that is born is created in darkness. This is the time of incubation, of sacred not-knowing before knowing and action sprouts from deep ground again.

Don’t let the not-enoughness that capitalism is trying to brainwash you with, infiltrate into your spiritual practices. You are not a self-improvement project. You are not a problem to be solved, a broken thing to be fixed, or worked on. I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a lame tea-cup quote, but you are truly a mystery. A moving, breathing, thinking, dreaming mystery. You will never get to the bottom of the mystery that is you or the mystery that is reality. And so in that sense there is no getting anywhere in spiritual practice…

All of my work and research is oriented towards using spiritual practice as a bridge to make contact with this mystery. Not to “figure” it out. But to make contact with it. To sit with it, in it. ‘To live the questions’ as Rilke said (yes this is my year of Rilke… Last winter was David Whyte…). To let ourselves marinate in what we are already drenched in, the unnamable ineffable source of source. To recognise even a slither of it, for a glimpse, or for eternity.

And somehow it is available in any and every moment. I do believe intimacy requires slowness though, it is hard to make deeper contact with anything in high speed.

And so here we are, everything in the natural world is conspiring for your slowing down, for your laying down all the harnesses of known and knowing, and slip into the groundless ground of the shimmering dark (as Adya called It).

‘You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire’ - Bukowski

The unbecoming dimension of the creative cycle is holy, and must be tended to with reverence, even and especially when we don’t know what is going to emerge in its void.

As an African proverb says, that dear Bayo Akomolafe often shares - ‘The times are urgent. Let us slow down’.

in devotion,

and for the rebellion

xRikke