Image: Sekhmet, Lion Headed Goddess of Ancient Egypt

In this season of barrenness, darkness, emptiness, we trust the Wisdom of the Dark Feminine.

Through her loving presence, through the truest, deepest desires of our hearts, we shall be led into newness and rebirth.

The Three-Day Festival of Samhain has ended. We are immersed in the Womb of the Sacred Feminine where deep soul work awaits us.

Sylvia Shaindel Senensky writes of our calling in these words:

“We have come to a time when we can no longer remain silent.  We are being called upon by the sorrowing and powerful Dark Feminine to know our own darkness and the profound richness of all dark places, even when they are laden with pain.  Through her we know the mystery of existence and the sacredness of the cycles of life.  We learn how important the destruction of the old ways is to the rebirth of the new.  When she steps into our lives and awakens us, we can be shattered to our core, and we know, as we see the tears streaming down her face, that she too is holding us in her compassionate and loving embrace.

“We need to know her as the source of life in the material realm, and to know her sorrow at how we have so unconsciously set out to destroy her…our Mother Earth.  She is calling upon us, each in our way to do our inner work, to become her allies, to become the best human beings we know how to be; to allow our creativity, our compassion and our love to flow to ourselves and to all life forms on this planet.  This is the lesson of the Feminine we all need to remember.  We need to honour our earth and all creatures, human and other, that she supports.  We need to nourish ourselves, each other, all children, and the unbelievable creative potential within each human being….As we come to a place of love and compassion for ourselves, our struggles, and our own vulnerable humanity, we will at the same time begin to kindle a similar compassion for others.  Love attracts love.  If we flood our planet with loving and transformative energy, our actions will begin to mirror our feelings.  We will come home to ourselves.” Healing and Empowering the Feminine 

Senensky’s words speak to our present reality. Today, on our planet, leaders, advocates for a healing of earth are gathered in Egypt to consider how we might intervene in what the UN Secretary General, Antonio Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, described to the assembly as humanity’s drive to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.

In December of 2020 Mr. Guterres had declared that “making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21^st Century.” Since then an ever-increasing bombardment of climate-related catastrophes across the planet has amplified his message. The ongoing war in Ukraine along with its other horrors, has hijacked plans to wean ourselves off the fossil fuels that are at the root of global warming.

This is our present reality. If it feels overwhelming that’s because it is. 

And yet, though it seems counter-intuitive, voices of wisdom repeat that the way ahead calls for a deepening of our spiritual practices, a commitment of our lives, our energies, our love, to the Sacred.

Thomas Berry saw that what was needed was “not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social of economic controls….What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness.”

Berry went on to say that “(W) e are just emerging from a technological entrancement. During this period the human mind has been placed within the narrowest confines it has experienced since consciousness emerged from its Paleolithic phase.”

To emphasize this, Berry noted, “Even the most primitive tribes have a larger vision of the universe, of our place and functioning within it, a vision that extends to celestial regions of space and to interior depths of the human in a manner far exceeding the parameters of our own world of technological confinement.”

This is what we must recover. This is the change in consciousness that will direct our efforts even at this late hour. As former civilizations once did, we must establish “our exalted place within the seasonal sequence of the earth’s natural rhythms” and create “spiritual centers where the meeting of the divine, the natural and the human” may take place. This is the source of the hope Berry saw in the current global crisis: ”the universe is revealing itself to us in a special manner just now. Also the planet Earth and the life communities of the earth are speaking to us through the deepest elements of our nature.”

(Quotations from and references to Thomas Berry: Ervin Laszlo, Foreword to Thomas Berry Dreamer of the Earth, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2011)

Where better for us to be now than within the womb of the Sacred Feminine, allowing ourselves to be transformed in consciousness, prepared to be the humans we must become in this crucial time.

As the wise ones teach us, we will only save what we love, and we will only love what we recognize as sacred.