Story

I posted this story a couple years ago now, at the time leading up to Yule; back then I thought it mostly about that rather more literal darkness and return to the light. Now, however, I'm seeing more layers to it, and all this talk about creative blocks and finding oneself lost in the dark has reminded me. I am finding it quite comforting now.

What I couldn't tell you then, that I can tell you now, is that the he of this story, the narrator of the story, is my daimon, and that, therefore, this story is true. By which I mean, it springs from the source, and so, like myth, it has many layers.

***

"Tell me a story," I say, as we lie there in the dark.

He laughs, for even to my own ears I sound like a child, but also, because he recognizes that winter is the proper time for stories, stories that both explore and keep away the dark.

"Okay," he says.

"Once there was a girl named Aridela, with hair black as ink. Now Aridela loved the dark and the night; and her favorite thing in the whole world was to lie asleep and dream, of faraway places and wonderful lands, of magical beings and forests that spoke. But one night, something terrible happened, and it happened in the dark she loved so much: her mother was lost."

"Oh," I say, all fear and foreboding, "You don't think my mom is going to die soon, do you?"

"Shhh," he says, "Don't interrupt. Your mother's fine, she'll outlive us all, trust me, and God help us. And anyway I didn't say Aridela's mother died; I just said she was lost. Try to pay attention.

"So Aridela lost her mother, and it made her very sad, and a little angry, too. And she looked long and far in the dark for her mother, and could not find her. And she began to hate the dark, the dark she had used to love.

"Now, underneath all hate is a little seed of fear; and though Aridela didn't see it at first, that fear grew until she feared the dark and became terrified of it. And she became too afraid to even put one foot in front of the other, and she stopped altogether, and sat down in the dark in a little ball, too frightened to move. And, eventually, she became so afraid that she dared not even breathe, hardly, and she felt the walls press in on her, as if she were deep underground.

"She stayed this way for a long time, silent, still, and unable to see, for there was no light, no light at all where she was.

"But in time she became so still that everything around her also became still; and at last she saw before her feet a tiny little light. And she saw that it was coming from a little pool, which had become so still it was now like a mirror; and the little light was the reflection of a star, a star that shone through a hole in the roof. And Aridela stood up, and pulled herself out of that hole onto a hilltop into the good night air, surrounded by the beautiful dark. And to the east she could see the horizon, and the faint light of the coming dawn. The end."

"The end?" I say. I don't think I find his story very comforting. "What happened to her mother? Did Aridela ever find her?"

"No," he says, "she didn't. Aridela's mother found her."

Well, that's a little better. "Now hang on," I say, and I know he knows that Aridela is a title of the Goddess Ariadne, "With a name like Aridela I'd expect Dionysos to be in there somewhere."

"He was," he says. "He was the Star."

Question

Oh, I wanted to ask:

Did anyone else experience that blinding brightness this summer? I had asked around, a little, to some Witchy sensitive sorts I know but they didn't know what I was talking about. I'm sure it's got a lot to do with where I was, but at the same time it really felt like a bigger phenomenon than just me, like a few years back when the Veil felt really thin.

Like I said it felt like this: like I was looking through a pane of dusty glass, upon which the sun was shining so brightly that everything was just this haze of brightness, and I couldn't see, See, much of anything.

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Return

It has been a long time, I know.

Terri Windling wrote several posts recently on creative block, comparing it to Persephone's abduction to the Underworld, to the realm of Hades, to that of Hel, to Hell. And in that post she reminded herself, reminded us, that it is a cycle, part of a whole. It is hard, so hard, to remember that.

Every dozen years or so I lose my art. It has happened twice or maybe three times so far in my life; it is exactly the time for me to be in that place that is no place again, and sure enough here I am. In the past it has taken a year or more to get through it. I know this.

And yet I don't know this. There is a difference, a big one, between knowing with your mind and knowing with your heart. My heart, right now, can't feel it. My Soul, I know, has no doubt that all is exactly as it should be, that I'm sure of. But I can't hear that part of me right now.

This has been a strange and awful summer in its own way. Nothing tragic or terrible has happened, my health for example has been just fine, but I have been very busy with a type of busy that I really don't like. It has been a summer of taking care of the little constant things, of being always on the surface; and while I feel atrocious complaining about kittens, of all things, still, it has all been a haze of fostering and medicating and bringing them back and forth to clinics and shelters and vets and keeping the sick ones separate and making sure they are healing and trapping the feral mothers and getting them spayed and watching things with an eye to them, not myself, first. I am not used to such work, and though I think it good work, even good Work, I am tired, annoyed with the chatter, out of myself.

In addition to all that, or maybe because of all that, this summer was bright, very bright. A few years ago, you may remember, I swear the Veil felt so thin I feared it would tear outright; this summer, it felt impervious, impenetrable. I couldn't See anything. It was like trying to look through a dusty pane of glass in the bright sun; everything beyond, everything on the Other side, was obscured by this horrible blinding haze.

And my daimon, my Muse, has disappeared too. Now, understand, I mean that perhaps rather more literally than most artists do when they speak of their Muse. I mean that friend of mine, that spirit guide or whatever he is, the one I could See clear as day, who was always there, has become absent. I do not believe for a minute that he is actually gone, mind you, but on my end I can't see him at all. I don't miss him. That disturbs me, very much. It is like I am forgetting to remember something very important, but my brain is carrying on as if nothing at all is wrong, as if this surface world is the real world and that life is just fine when it lacks richness and depth.

Like Terri says in her post, I can handle the dark. I regularly go there, as a matter of fact, or rather I did. You can call it active imagination, meditation, visioning, visions, shamanic journeys, whatever; and some part of me is outraged that despite all that, all those years of willingly, openly, with curiosity and wonder, going there to See what I can See, still, this blankness and block has come upon me. It feels unfair, I suppose. Perhaps I am arrogant to feel so. And perhaps my past willingness means that this time will be quicker, less frightening than it might have been; I can never know that, I suppose.

But it is very strange. Because it doesn't feel dark. I do not feel lost in the dark woods; I have been there, I think, and I know, like Hecate says, that I am never really lost, because the trees know where they are, and I know that I am here, as I always am. But it doesn't feel dark; it feels blank, empty, on the surface, with nothing beneath me. And so of course I have not been grounded; I have lost the connection, the one that I had without even trying so much of the time. I have had to relearn it, a little, and have been trying; but it is so hard to remember when you don't remember you are forgetting.

I used to hate autumn. I know, I know, that makes me a very bad Pagan; but when I was growing up it meant the start of several months when I was always cold, as my miserly father didn't think heat all that important. But this year, I was so very grateful to pass the autumnal equinox, when the dark finally outweighs the light. When the sun finally went away a little, died a little to let the dark come back. It has been such a relief.

And I think I can feel it returning now, slowly, a little.

I went for a walk the other day, on a chilly cloudy day here in New England. I walked a mile or more on the road into the forest nearby; and eventually I turned around to come back.

There is a little bridge not far from my house, a little bridge that washed out in the terrible rains we had more than a year ago. The road by that bridge is closed to traffic, though the bridge itself is passable on foot. The detour the cars take is the long way round, so I came back by the bridge just like I'd gone out. It is a strange little place now; though it has only been closed a year, great tufts of grass are growing in the cracks in the middle of the road, and the road itself is covered with sand and drifting leaves. It doesn't take long.

As I walked over that little bridge, the starlings in the trees started up their chattering song, just as a breeze came from over the water, balmy and warm. And in the middle of autumn I suddenly smelled spring.

I think that is a good sign, after all. I think it is coming back to me.