The Lure of the Dark Goddess

Die, my love, die.
She lures me in.

Shivers in my body. My head throbs. My eyes sting. 
She lures me in. 

100 things to do.
Expectations. Promises. People need me. 

A heavy heart. A confused mind.
I've been denying her, avoiding her, by all means.

Come my love.
Give me your blood, she whispers.

My grip of resistance weakens. 
With mud under my finger nails, I give in. 

I slide down the slippery slope. 
Down and down. She beckons.

The dark embraces me. More and more. 
Welcome. There is nothing to fear, my love. 

She sits, without stirring, in the darkness.
Hooded, in a long black cloak. I see no face. 

Her voice is deep, soft and gentle. 
She calls for my offerings. 

Offerings of pain, of grief, of rage, of fear. 
My burdens, she receives them all. 

We sit there, silently, with it all. 
I shed some tears. She is unmoved.

Everything melts into the same darkness. 
All is one. Empty and full. 

There is nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.
Nothing to achieve. Nothing to prove.

Rest, my love. Rest. 

Text: Georgina Peard
Photo: Carlos Gonzalez

Dear friends,

The Dark Goddess gets some bad rap. 

The Witch, the Winter Queen, the Crone, the Goddess of Death. She exists in every culture. Kali, the Morrigan, Sheela-na-Gig, Persephone, Mary Magdalene, to name just a few.

She is in the decaying mulch of leaves on the ground. She is the dark cloak of night. She is our dark night of the soul. 

She is also compassion, healing, and rebirth. Let us not forget.

When we fear her, we make her dangerous and wrong, and do everything in our capacity to avoid her and strip her of power. We make her something out there, separate to ourselves. 

But she is within. 

She initiates you into ever deeper layers of your being, of your soul. She beckons you home. 

We fear her because she is our deepest, innermost truth beckoning. And yet, that is often inconvenient or perhaps terrifying based on the lives and identities we have constructed. 

When you feel overwhelmed, stressed-out, exhausted, depressed or in emotional crisis, she is the one beckoning you to come home... to yourself. 
 

Without our natural cycles of darkness and death, we will always be out of balance, lacking depth and burning out. 

Menstruating women have the opportunity to experience the wisdom of this cycle every month. We can all chose to honour this cycle, rather than fear or deny it. 

If we continue to push for constant growth, to be consistently on full power, always awake.... it will be our downfall.

Our societies will not survive if we continue to deny the gifts and wisdom of the Dark Goddess.

It is time to acquaint ourselves with her and learn to honour her power. We must learn to enter the dark with grace and humility and consciousness. We must learn to navigate the dark so that we can be reborn, again and again.

We must learn the art of dying in order to learn the art of living.

Dear friends, as we enter this season of the Dark Goddess I invite you to create some space to get to know her better, acknowledge her existence and familiarise yourself with her gifts and her potential. 

I will share some more reflections in the coming weeks to support your journey into the wisdom of the dark winter.

Love and blessings,
Georgina xxx