on being buried

Content warning: themes of death and dying.

It’s Samhain here in the Northern hemisphere. Everything is dark, cold and damp. The high energy and heat of Summer feels long gone. I love this time of year, the Celtic new year, the beginning of Winter when all is slow and quiet.

I feel in many ways my own life runs parallel to this time of year, the alchemy of trauma catapulted me into my Autumn years much sooner than I anticipated, adding the change of Perimenopause to that just beds it in deeper.

I used to personify Summer, all frantic and full of go go go. A lot of that was masking, trying to avoid staring into myself so I wouldn’t have to be alone and in the stillness with my feelings and thoughts. That was a place I did not want to visit, it was vast and deep and scary.

I was also terrified of death when I was younger, the thought of it used to create a rush of adrenaline up through my body that made me want to run and hide in a place where I could escape it. I couldn’t and wouldn’t entertain it. Combine that with our reluctance in the West to even talk about it or acknowledge it and to pretend that it won’t affect us and it’s a pretty potent mix. So Summer was safe, it was bright, it represented life. The dark half of the year was barely tolerated and I dragged myself through it every year just waiting for the first touch of Spring.

Then Autumn swept in, or rather it cannoned in, exploding the lid off my neatly boxed emotions. Everything shot out and left me breathless and spinning. I was completely shattered, shards of who I was, the walls I’d created and what I thought I ‘should’ be all went pinging off into the aether. My efforts in the early days after my accident to gather it all back in and shut the lid were in vain, there was absolutely no way that person was returning.

Then came the burying,

my first era gone. A ghost of a person floating around the earth, floating around the house. Not in my body, just observing from the in-between. The pain of losing myself so raw and heart wrenching. Everything I was, just lost. The grief of this time was all encompassing, a distressing and harrowing place where I was isolated but also completely at a loss to what was happening and how to stop myself from fracturing more and more into the abyss.

Being so unprepared due to my earlier reluctance to tolerate uncertainty and tolerate myself meant that I could not cope, I could not escape into masking by ‘doing’, my accident had taken my energy, my physicality. All I had left was inertia and wall staring and this meant I was finally facing myself. It was overwhelming. I had no capacity to contain this wild wolf that had been unleashed.

I wanted to die.

After a few gut wrenching, distressing years of this is when my relationship with Death started to change, for a while it was only the death of sleep that gave me comfort. The pause of the coma-like state that helped me endure being alive but not alive. It was around four or five years post accident that the fight I’d been putting up to ‘just get better’ was spent and it was then I started to release my resistance to being ‘ultra-alive’ (to stave off Death and Shadow) and slowly fell into the entombment that the darkness offered.

It was here I began to walk alongside Death, I began to talk to it, to understand it. I realised that honouring the archetype of Death allowed me to accept my second epoch, the new me that was forming from the long arduous labour of rebirth. Death has enabled acceptance of self, ALL of it. My spiritual work now involves Death, I embody the Hermit, the Cailleach in her wild elder self is a teacher. I look to Death when things get tough. Nature is imbued with Death, it is everywhere. I am not love and light, I do not spiritually bypass any longer. Life is gritty and earthy and dirty and has Shadow, we deny ourselves such roundness and richness when we push it away.

I’m lucky because I got to die to myself and I came back. This has given the gift of clarity and a rootedness I never had. You don’t go through the initiation and come back the same person. So welcome Shadow, welcome Death my greatest teachers. Without whom I would not have such strong boundaries or compassion or courage.

Am I still scared of death? Sometimes it can still grip me in the dead of night but what is more scary was my first life where I gave away my power and didn’t honour myself.