I woke while it was still dark. The stirrings of my dreams kept me liquid, not quite conscious. I got up. Made coffee. My sweetheart came sleepily into the kitchen, and kissed me all over my face. I gathered my journal, my books, my coffee, myself. All of us settled into the deep blue light of almost-morning.
Before the light could creep through the windows, I was in the bathtub, candles lit. My bare legs steaming in the barely-there light. Bubbles crackling in my ears. The sound of a distant heartbeat echoing in the slow-moving waves of sound through water. I thought, This is probably the last bath I will ever take in this place.
We are approaching the last dark moon of the year. It will happen on Solstice, shortest & darkest day of the year. And as the year draws to a close, the days are getting darker, and everything is curling into itself and asking, “What next?”
I thought about this as I let my bathwater cool this morning, watching the light approach: we have so few words for Transformation. I see this all around me, in the people I love and the processes that are being gone through, ready or not. We have language and perspective on Back Then, and When, but for here, for where we are now — most of us in extraordinary and utterly disarming transformation — we have no language. What do we call the in-between?
It’s chaotic here. It has the energy of an unpredictably spinning top; any of us, it seems, at any moment, could sputter to a catastrophic halt. And yet we think we’re abnormal. Alone.
But I promise you: we are not. Because even if all we have is ourselves and the darkness, the dark knows her way. She’s been here before. She is the container where all things pass through the eye of the needle; the space between worlds. It is a gracious and natural process, the thing that happens when, finally still and in surrender to the giant ‘I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING’ sign that glows above our heads, we just stop, palms open, ready.
