There is no new creation that endures without its concomitant disorder.
Yet it is the undervaluation of disorder, generally regarded as a state to be escaped at all costs, that is a hallmark of modernity, and rules our historical time.
—Nathan Schwartz-Salant, The Order-Disorder Paradox
In the chaos of difficulty at the beginning, order is already implicit.
—The I Ching, Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning
Many of my patients come to my office at times of crisis. Rachel came just as her mother was dying and her nineteen-year-old college athlete son was experiencing strange bouts of fatigue and weight loss. Rachel described herself as being in the middle of “a perfect storm.” And indeed, the storm got worse three months later, when her mother passed away two weeks before her son was diagnosed with cancer.
She was already sobbing in the waiting room when I opened the door to my office. I took her in my arms and held her. When I stepped back and looked in her eyes, I saw dark oceans, uncharted depths, two tunnels without end leading nowhere.
“It's too much,” she said. “How does any human being hold all this?”
Inside, I felt the impossibility of words. I said nothing but led her into the office and had her lie down on the treatment table. I held her wrist in my hands. Taking her pulses was like touching rain as it falls into a pond. So many tears—too many tears to count.
In the presence of Rachel's suffering, any order or meaning I could attempt to bring to her experience would be an assault, an insult to the dissolving, disordering magnitude of her experience.
So, what could I do? What can any of us say or do at moments like this, when there is nothing left but not knowing?
Alchemy counsels us to wait and do nothing. Alchemy calls us to go deeper than we believed we could go, to surrender to the currents of life, death, and rebirth, to treasure the lead of embodiment even when the pain is too great to bear, to trust that even when we cannot see, even when we have no answers, and even when all the questions themselves are erased, to hold on to the belief that there is a glint of gold waiting somewhere in the darkness.
Sometimes this is all I can offer my patients—to create with them a space where their healing process can be carried like an embryo, a fetus, a nearly invisible gossamer thread of possibility.
“There's no way for you to hold this,” I said. “It's too much for anyone to hold. So, for now, do nothing. Lean back. Feel the table beneath you, the air on your skin. It's enough right now to simply breathe.”
A mother's encounter with her child's death annihilates our human ideas about right order, goodness, or meaning. Yet, Rachel's experience, overwhelming and beyond comprehension as it is, does not feel foreign to me. While her loss is deeply and tragically personal, I also experience it as something familiar, universal. I know in my bones that Rachel's grief is also the grief of the world. If I allow myself to feel the reality of the current moment, I realize that, like Rachel, we are all facing a mind-numbing loss. We are all living in crisis.
As the polar ice caps melt before our eyes, as each year fewer bees and butterflies arrive in our gardens, as the last remaining two thousand-year-old redwood trees succumb to disease, as dozens of species disappear into the void each day, as farmlands dry, forest fires rage, sea levels rise, carcinogens proliferate, and the numbers of homeless refugees swell to unimaginable proportions, we are experiencing the death of the world as we know it. While we attempt to find a place to stand, the ground we have stood upon as a species for the past two hundred thousand years dissolves beneath our feet. As we seek refuge in nature, the very environment that our bodies and nervous systems were designed to inhabit in a synergistic relationship of interbeing is fragmenting. The magnitude of the problem grows greater each day and floods our human capacity for reason, empathy, faith, or grace.
As I approach the closing of this book about modern-day alchemy and healing at this time on our planet, I am daunted by the overwhelming enormity of the lead, the vastness of the illness, the complexity of the systemic disease. But I am also reminded of the numerous ancient alchemical engravings that portray devastated landscapes and shattered vessels. Beside richly colored paintings of celestial weddings, we find images of burning cities charred to smoking ruins, bloodthirsty lions devouring the sun, couples attacking each other tooth and claw, kings beheaded and thrown to dogs. These images point to an alchemical understanding of the primal spiritual necessity for the soul to face and somehow deal with the inevitability of dissolution and death. On the other side of the bleak destruction, there is always moonlight shining when the sunlight dims, green seeds sprouting from the blackened ground, and the rose, always the rose, blossoming alongside the thorns.
And it is here, in this paradox, in the ancient alchemical treasuring of chaos and dissolution, that I find hope. It is in this dismembering fragmentation of meaning that I remember. Anything truly new requires that we somehow find a way to bear the destruction of the old. Without lead, there can be no gold. The miracle of healing transcends my ego's capacity to predict or understand. And it is into this ocean of mystery that I must be willing to swim if I am to truly enter the laboratory and move forward with the work at hand.
Nigredo, as I've defined before, means “darkening.” In alchemy, the nigredo is the contracting complement to the coniunctio's bright expansion. Like yin and yang, the coniunctio and nigredo engender each other. With every marriage, every birth, every heart-opening connection, an opposing force of shadow and separation simultaneously arises.
At the closing of every workshop that I lead, I remind participants that there will likely be a let-down, a feeling of abandonment and aloneness afterward. The more powerful the connections that happen and the insights that arise during our time together, the more destabilizing the disorder that may follow. I've found that it's especially important for me to be careful when driving home after I've done a strong piece of work with a group of students as cars appear out of nowhere, deer leap from the side of the highway, or I end up taking wrong exits that leave me stranded on one-way streets. I've also observed that Benjamin and I have had some of our most memorable knock-down, drag-out fights after we've wrapped up a great weekend of inspired teaching. At this point, I accept that a nigredo will follow any expansive growth experience. It's best for me to be prepared for it, care for it, and welcome it as an aspect of the integration process.
In fairy tales, the nigredo is represented by the uninvited thirteenth fairy who shows up with a curse at the celebratory feast of the newborn princess. In the creative process, it is the debilitating self-doubt and critical voices that attack us after a time of rich productivity. In new love, it is the first argument. It is post-partum depression, the setting of the sun, the waning of the full moon, the tipping back down of the sheng cycle at the height of Summer.
Governed by the laws of entropy, mortality, and time, the nigredo represents the resistance of yang spirit to its earthly fall. It is our inevitable encounter with the downward pull of gravity, with the restricting limits of time and space and the inevitability of disintegration. The nigredo is a reality that cannot be eradicated, but with consciousness it can be worked with. Through our conscious acceptance of the nigredo and our willingness to bear its slow and painful wearing down of illusion, the light of spirit incarnates to illuminate the flesh of the soul. As we learn to hold steady through the pride-shredding ordeals, despairs, rages, and initiatory suffering of the nigredo, our sense of Self is strengthened. As we pass through the nigredo, our insights and ideas gather weight and take root in the form of action in our everyday life, our relationships grow through enduring the trials of separation and doubt. In this way, we benefit and are guided by the underworld wisdom of the night.
At the root of alchemy is the power of blackness. Returning to the etymology I discussed in Chapter 1, even our modern English word alchemy is infused with kem—the root Egyptian word for the rich, black earth and the fertility of the dark soil of the Nile valley. In addition, kem suggests the black color of lead and other metal ores hidden underground.
Kem also had another more esoteric meaning for the Egyptians. The word was used to refer to the shining blackness of the pupil at the center of the eye. The kem of the pupil contains a special kind of blackness that is associated not only with its capacity to absorb and transform light into images but also with its ability to act as a tiny mirror that reflects back in miniature the images of the outer world. This reflective capacity of the pupil is especially activated in the presence of the lover who gazes into the eye of the beloved. In his essay The Perfect Black, alchemist and scholar Aaron Cheak writes:
On one hand, just as the moon is the receiver and reflector of the sun's light, so too is the pupil of the eye the feminine, receptive function of the solar eye. At the same time however, it must be recognized that the feminine aspect of the divine eye also had an active function alongside its passive or receptive role. The feminine aspect of the divine eye played a crucial role . . . she is the medium through which the masculine principle engenders itself . . . the “Mistress of the Universe” . . . the rearing cobra that appeared on the crowns of the Pharaohs.
For the Egyptians, blackness symbolized divine power made manifest. Furthermore, they understood that power comes not only from the masculine principal of the heavens above but also and equally from the feminine principal of the Earth below. In their myths, the light at the center of Horus's eye was given to him by his mother Isis. The power of sight of the sky-god was a gift he received from the Divine Feminine.
Throughout this book, I've emphasized that the ultimate goal of alchemical work is the activation of the shen from its burial place in the matrix of matter and the body. Taoist alchemists referred to this work as the blossoming of the Golden Flower and European alchemists spoke of it as the discovery of the Philosopher's Stone. From an alchemical perspective, the light of the gold you seek does not shine down from above, but rather rises up from the darkness below. Inner radiance and illuminated sight emerge only after you have sacrificed the knowing brightness of the ego.
The quickening of the shen is most often precipitated by something we would never choose, by the opposite of what we recognize as grace or blessing. It often begins with a shock that disrupts our notion of cause and effect, thrusting us into a confusing chaos, a fathomless void. It began for Rachel when she learned of her son's diagnosis and continued on after his death when she fell, like Sleeping Beauty, into a paralyzing inertia that lasted for several years.
The Nekyia or night sea journey is a mythological motif, an archetype, that symbolically describes the nigredo phase of the alchemical process. The Nekyia takes you on a nocturnal voyage. You are swallowed by whales, left to wander in murky marshlands and become entrapped in enchanted forests. One of the earliest versions of the Nekyia comes from ancient Egypt, where the sun god Re drowns and dies each night in the primeval oceanic depths of the water god Nun and is reborn each morning with the sunrise. In Sumeria, the goddess Inanna willingly descends to the realm of Ereshkigal, the Queen of Death, in order to be initiated and claim her full powers. In Greece, Persephone is abducted to the Underworld by Hades and Odysseus's ocean voyage takes him away from home for most of his adult life.
The motif of the Nekyia is found in ancient stories and legends, but it is also found in the here and now through the experiences of our lives. The Nekyia is happening each day to each of us, in real time. Birth and death are night sea journeys as is sleep. All healing processes that lead to greater integrity and wholeness require a Nekyia of some kind. Inner work that leads to the integration of a disowned part of the Self will bring you through the dismembering and resurrecting energies of this realm. It is the journey each of us is facing now as, for the first time in the history of our species, we've been presented with the prospect of our own extinction as a result of climactic or nuclear catastrophe.
The paradox of the Nekyia is that its chaos both destroys and creates. The descent is the turning point, the critical moment when you at last are forced to let go and surrender, when all the outmoded structures of your life dissolve and new possibilities are born. Rather than resist it or deny that it's happening, regard it as a necessary part of your soul's development and honor its power. Through bearing its loss, you gain. If you survive the trial, like Vasilisa, who survives her encounter with the legendary Russian witch Baba Yaga, you return with a gift—an inner fire that allows you to see in the darkness.
After many years of studying the Five Element Wheel, I discovered that it has embedded within it a graphic representation of a Nekyia. It is a map that can help us navigate the night sea journey as well as the chaos of our age. Circling the Wheel from Water to Wood to Fire to Earth to Metal, we trace the circular unfolding of the organic processes of carbon-based life—elemental, vegetative, and biological change in our time-bound world.
At the close of Winter, Water rises through the stems of plants to support the growth and negentropic directionality of Wood in Spring.
Wood burns to feed the expansive light and heat of the Fire that defines Summer.
Fire fuels the generative processes of organic matter that produce the generous nourishing abundance of Earth in late Summer.
Finally, Earth disintegrates to form compost and the buried crystalline mineral structures of Metal in the Autumn season.
But then we arrive at a riddle.
How do the inert crystals and minerals of Metal rise again as the vital life-giving power of Water? How is the life force resurrected from the most entropic point of the cycle back to potent negentropy? What is it that reinvigorates the Wheel of Life and allows it to continue to turn on and on through time without running down?
When I was in acupuncture school asking these questions, my teachers never offered satisfactory explanations. Over many years of personal research into myths, symbols, etymology, and perhaps most importantly, observation of the universal qualities inherent to the healing processes of my patients, I finally put the pieces together. The answers to these questions reside at the bottom of the Wheel, in what I have come to call the Mysterious Pass, where Metal is buried and then reborn as vital, potentized Water.
At this point in the process, change does not follow the orderly, rhythmic alternation of night and day, or the predictable cycles of the Elements and the Seasons, or the linear stages of organic growth. The change that happens between Metal and Water is archaic, primal, fundamental. It is a leap or mutation invisible to ordinary sight. It is a radical interruption of a natural cycle that happens outside of ordinary time, akin to labor contractions, earthquakes, hurricanes, or the descriptions we read of near-death experiences, when our usual ways of orienting to the world dissolve and we approach the zero point that lies between being and nonbeing. This is the point of discontinuity where the unfolding of organic process breaks down. At the very bottom of the Wheel is the place of a miracle, where wu xing—the world of matter—is penetrated and reinvigorated by the potent spiritual energies of the unseen Underworld.
What I've come to understand is that at the bottom, in this shadow realm at the most yin point of the Wheel, between the alchemical Elements of Metal and Water, we discover a doorway to the cavern of the Dark Goddess. The Mysterious Pass is the domain of Xi Wang Mu, the Queen Mother of the West, the Taoist mythological Goddess of Life, Death, and Rebirth, where spirit incarnates and inert matter comes back to life. Here is where we are invited to let go, to surrender, to exhale into the emptiness and trust that the divine will be there to carry us through to our next inhalation.
Figure 13. The Mysterious Pass
In this darkness, in the place where we truly cannot see and where our rational mind is rendered powerless, something is coming to life. In this chaos of new beginnings, there is already an implicit form. In the lead of impasse, death, and destruction, there is already the promise of a hidden spark of gold. Dennis William Hauck offers this elegant insight into the alchemical mystery of this place of opacity, lead, and darkness as it relates to our own healing:
Even the elemental metal carries the seed of its own redemption. The alchemists knew that Fire is lord over lead, for the metal has a low melting point and is easily separated from its ore by roasting in an open flame, and the metal itself melts in a candle flame. Lead expands on heating and contracts on cooling more than any other solid heavy metal.
. . . lead carries deeply hidden within its structure the fire of its own transformation. Many lead salts reveal a whole rainbow of brilliant colors, with the solar colors of yellow, orange, and red predominating. This is why lead has been used in paints for so many centuries. Finely divided lead powder is pyrophoric (“fire containing”) and easily catches fire or erupts spontaneously in flames. When made into a fine powder, lead metal must be kept in a vacuum to keep from catching fire. Otherwise, it ignites and burns down to a bright yellow ash, revealing its deeply hidden solar signature. So, the wonder of lead is that hidden deep inside the gray, dead metal is a tiny, eternal spark that is the seed of its own resurrection. In the eyes of alchemists, this makes lead the most important metal despite its unattractive darkness. For dull lead and gleaming gold are really the same things, only at different stages of growth or maturity.
The Secret Fire inside lead is really the alchemical basis for transforming lead into gold, and correspondingly, gives mankind hope for its own spiritual transformation. That tiny spark of light in the darkest part of matter makes resurrection part of the structure of the universe.
It is our task to have faith that we can pass through this Grand Darkness to be reborn on the other side, that we can be obliterated without perishing. This faith is the gift of alchemy. We have the map as well as the keys to the laboratory. The Dark Goddess is waiting for us to open the door.
Xi Wang Mu, Queen Mother of the Western Paradise, Most Honored One, Empress of the Immortals, the most ancient and revered of all the Taoist deities, presides over the realm of Birth, Life, Death, and Resurrection. She represents the spiritual principle of matter, the power of the yang feminine. She is the potency of the uterus, the will of the seed, the high-grade energy sequestered in the oil reserves, the negentropic upward thrust of geysers and hot springs. She oversees all organic processes, from the slow disintegration of stones to the ephemeral life of a luna moth to the gestation, birth, growth, and decay of a tree, a mountain, a flowing river, of your own bones and body.
The Queen lives far beyond the reach of the conscious mind, deep in the caves below the sacred Kunlun Mountain of China. Her mountain is inhabited by fantastical beings and shamanistic emissaries. Among them are the three-footed crow, the nine-tailed fox, a dancing frog, and the moon-hare who pounds minerals, mixes herbs, and prepares her magical elixirs in a mortar. There are phoenixes and dancing maidens and azure lads, and spirits riding on white stags. She resides here, in this place that is infinitely deep, infinitely dark. A place with no beginning and no end, in a body that also has no beginning and no end.
In the ancient texts, the Queen is described as a fearsome creature with a human face, tiger's teeth, and a leopard's tail, wild hair flowing about her as she sits on the three-legged stool that is her throne, above the yellow sulfur springs of the Underworld. At the center of her palace on Kunlun Mountain is a magic fountain where the Feast of the Immortals takes place. Her meats include bear paws, monkey lips, and dragon livers; for dessert, she dines on the peach of immortality that ripens every three thousand years from her magic tree.
She, like all her other fearsome sisters—Ereshkigal, the Sumerian Lady of the Great Place Below; Pele, the Hawaiian Goddess of Volcanoes; Baba Yaga, the Russian Witch of the Forest—walks through flames without ever getting burned, has a voracious appetite, a nasty sense of humor, and zero tolerance for fools. And yet, at other times, the Queen Mother is described as a compassionate, exquisite, and gracious goddess who presides over the Peach Orchards of Immortality and endows her visitors with health, renewal, and even everlasting life.
What is the magic, what is the incantation, what is the prayer, that transforms the ravenous monster of the Underworld into the gracious goddess of orchards and fountains? And how many more years will it take for her peaches to once again ripen on the branches of her sacred tree?
Severed in two by the separating mind of mental consciousness throughout the past five hundred years, Xi Wang Mu has lived a dual life. Subdued by the patriarchal gods and the kings of medieval China, one part of the Goddess sits demurely on an alabaster throne dressed in courtly, silken gowns as she falls in love with mortals and sings to her pet birds. This aspect of the Goddess became a paragon of female skill, grace, and beauty for medieval Chinese poets and painters. Today, with the extreme secularization and materialization in the People's Republic of China, she has all but disappeared from view.
But another part of Xi Wang Mu lives on in China as well as in the collective unconscious of humanity. Dishonored and relegated to the shadow, this other aspect of the Goddess becomes the Night Mare, the hysteric, the Thirteenth Fairy who shows up to cast the death spell at our feast of life. Darkness has become the enemy rather than the partner of Light. Matter has become a tomb of annihilation rather than a womb of gestation. The body and all of Nature an unwieldy machine we endlessly try to fix and control. Feelings of foreboding, anxiety, and terror combined with compulsive activity and the desperate attempt to impose order on the world eclipse our creative capacities for introspection, surrender, rest, renewal, and the surprising new possibilities that arise in the presence of her deep Underworld wisdom.
When consciousness is overly dominated by phallocentric mental attitudes, reverence for the darkness, the night, myths and dreams, and the spacious wandering of the unconscious are no longer valued as necessary aspects of a spiritually balanced life. Rather, in the face of the ultimate power of the yin, of entropy, death, and darkness, our modern consciousness responds with adrenal-fueled activity, denial, and an exhausting, futile attempt to outrun her relentless tidal pull.
If we shift our view and approach the Goddess's dark depths with respect and compassion, we can begin to receive the benefit of her support and wisdom. Whenever we face a life-threatening disease or come to terms with the process of aging, any time we're brought to our knees by loss, addiction, or pain, she is waiting to receive us into her infinite mystery. When we reach an impasse in our work life, our relationships, our creativity, we can choose to surrender to the unknown, to reverse the handle of the stars and turn inward, following the thread that leads us back to our own source . . . to the Self, to the Tao.
Over the long months and years that I sat with Rachel after her son's death, she and I often sat in silence. Infinities passed between our words. At moments, I felt myself reduced to a transparent body without voice or substance in the face of her annihilating despair. The one certainty I had was that there was nothing I could say or do to make things better for her.
When I treated Rachel with needles or essential oils, the only way I stayed fully present to the pain was by simultaneously channeling healing energy to my own heart, reminding my feet to reach down to receive the sustaining energies of the Earth. In order to hold the space for Rachel's devastation, I had to continually regulate and calm the shock waves that rocked through my own nervous system in the presence of hers. The one thing that sustained me, the only thing I knew, was to turn this suffering over to the Dark Goddess.
And so, week after week, again and again, I would lean back into her night black skirts. I would swim out into her wide, devouring ocean. Silently, but with all my strength, I would call on the Goddess to support me through this session and the next. Behind me, I could feel her wide, inscrutable eyes opening a gateway back to origin. I would take a breath and lean back further. Then the wind would shift, and I could feel her there in the room. With Rachel. With me. With all of us here on the planet, struggling to heal a wound too great to feel, to stay present to life and death in the same moment.
As a healer, I have watched death. I have watched people die and I have witnessed people watch others die. I watched as one of my patients fought multiple myeloma for fifteen years before he died, spending millions of dollars to fight tooth and nail to the very last days. I watched as my wild older brother went out in a blaze of glory, never admitting he had Stage 4 lung cancer until a few days before he succumbed, swiftly and with very little fuss, as he preferred, saying simply and without fanfare, “I'm leaving now.”
I've come to realize that there are an infinite variety of ways to die. There are deaths that are sweet and timely, like my mother's. There are deaths that rip your heart from your body and tear it into a thousand ragged pieces, like Rachel's son's. And there are deaths that come too late, like the death of a friend who spent her final decade waiting in a nursing home for something she could no longer name or remember.
What I have come to understand through watching death is that it is not the enemy. Although there are times when it is very wrong and times when it is absolutely right, death is not the problem our culture makes it out to be. Just as our lack of reverence for the Dark Goddess has turned her into a fearsome Bitch Goddess, it is our attitude toward death that has turned it into a devouring monster. Fighting this monster, somehow postponing or arresting the entropic power of its yin mystery, has become the final, and ultimately futile, battle of patriarchal mental consciousness. As a central component of this full-scale war, fighting death and prolonging the life span has become the obsession of our modern health care system. This focus, while benefitting investors in the pharmaceutical, insurance, medical research, and technology sectors, is draining vast stores of time, money, and intellectual resources that could be used to promote planetary well-being, including care for the young and underserved, preventive health initiatives, and detoxification of the environment.
Death has become such a horrifying beast in our culture that it's nearly taboo to talk about it. On many occasions, Rachel told me that she noticed friends avoiding her when she went shopping or walked along the path by the river. “They look away,” she'd report, “or, when we meet, they talk about themselves and act like nothing's happened or, worst of all, they ask if I'm feeling better.” This awkwardness and lack of honoring rituals in our culture reflects an attempt to deny the ultimate power of the Dark Goddess. The tragedy is that this denial is not only futile, it also robs us of the benefits of death's redemptive power and its necessary lessons for the soul.
One of the most important understandings I've received from the wisdom world of alchemy is that death is a part of life. The two are not separate. When we resist the nigredo, the death phase, whether in a relationship, a project, or a life, we are also resisting the powerful energies of renewal. The Dark Goddess destroys what needs to die in order for life to continue. There are, of course, deaths where this is easier to accept than others. There are deaths of marriages that, while sad, unleash an abundance of creativity and eros. There are deaths of illusions and infatuations that open the door for freedom and growth. And there are deaths of elders that make way for younger, more vital energies.
And then there are situations, like Rachel's, where this alchemical principle crashes against a rock-hard wall and hits a “no” that shakes the foundation of our cosmos. There are situations, like the perilous deaths of leopards, gorillas, and sea turtles—all species at risk of extinction, the death of the coral reefs, the deaths worldwide of millions of people each year from hunger. How do we honor the Dark Goddess when she annihilates what we love?
After a time of decay comes the turning point. The powerful light that has been banished returns. There is movement but it is not brought about by force.
—The I Ching, Hexagram 24, Return
For years after her son's death, Rachel continued to feel numb and hopeless. There were moments when I thought I should be doing more, trying harder, giving some kind of helpful advice. Another part of me trusted that the task I had been given through our work together was to bear witness to her suffering, to hold steady and not be overwhelmed by her grief, to put my hands on her feet, to remind her that she still lived in a body.
Then, for a while, she stopped coming. I thought of calling to check in but decided against it. I decided to wait and see what happened.
When she returned, something was different. There in the dark tunnel of her gaze, I saw a tiny spark and I knew she was seeing me, clearly, perhaps for the first time. There had been a dream. Her son was little, and she was putting him to bed. She covered him carefully with a blanket and sang him to sleep. When she woke up, she knew that after years of resistance, it was time for her to let go of the ashes she kept in a box in her son's bedroom. It was time to take them to the river and let them go.
She watched the dust as it blew like gray pollen in the wind. She watched it settle on the black water and slowly sink below. Then, she said, she felt that there was really nothing left to live for. No, she would never take her life, but she would never fully live again.
But later that same day, as she was working in her garden, digging some weeds that had grown up around a small pile of stones, she felt something in the soil, something not rock or root, but cool and round like a coin. She dug down deeper, clawing the dirt away with her fingernails. She dug around the edges of the object, until she could manage to release it from the grip of the earth that had hardened around it. She pulled it up.
It was a small round disc, a St. Christopher's medal, the patron saint of children and travelers, the very one who carried a child, unknown to him, across a mighty river, a child who later was revealed as Christ.
As a young girl, her mother placed such a medal around her neck for safety and protection, but she had not seen one since. She had no idea where it had come from or how it had made its way into the garden. But she cleaned it up, put it on a chain, and was now wearing it around her neck.
Stories like Rachel's that shake the foundation of what we believe is real and possible happen when we draw close to the realm of death and transformational healing. The shattering grief and the encounter with chaos force us to surrender our fixed ideas about reality. This reorientation is a part of the process of soul-level healing—the realization that we don't know, that we cannot know, and yet something way bigger than our limited ego does know and can, if we listen carefully enough, help us to understand.
In the years I spent working with Rachel and many other patients going through loss and grief, I learned the lesson of limitation. I learned that the only thing I can do in response to the magnitude, the madness, the incomprehensible suffering we face when we come into a body, is do everything I can to remain present.
If I had tried to force some kind of logic onto Rachel's experience or to fix things for her in any way, she would have surely fled. And, if she had not found the fortitude to stay in the work—without hope, without expectation, without demanding that anything change—then the crack in the egg of ordinary time and causal linear reality would not have happened for her. We would have missed the Dark Goddess, would not have felt her brushing us lightly as she passed by. Solutions, if there are to be any for Rachel, or for any of us living at this time of death and rebirth and chaotic transformation on our planet, can only come through letting go of trying to make things work out the way we want them to. The solutions will come from another dimension, another time, through our deep listening. They will only arise from the integrity we cultivate in our relationships to ourselves, with each other, and through our capacity to trust the healing power of love.
Touching the medal around her neck, Rachel looked at me and said, “It's impossible but true. And I guess I have to take it as a message. It's time for me to let him go. He needs to get on with his own journey, as do I.”
Alchemy tells us that renewal is possible after illness, after loss, after despair, and even after death, but it can only come through a surrender and a descent into darkness. It cannot be bought, bargained for, or forced through the personal will. Its timing is not under conscious control. The returning current can only be cared for, cultivated, and dreamed into becoming. Just as when, at the still point of Winter, a black line cracks the ice and deep below sleeping seeds stir in their dark beds, so vision and hope return when the conditions and the timing are favorable.
As we face the disintegration of a world that has forgotten that life and death are connected and that darkness is the necessary companion to the light, we must resist the impulse to cling onto familiar thought patterns or to reason our way through to premature, one-sided solutions. Equally, giving in to denial, cynicism, and despair, while tempting, will not serve the renewal of the world. It is crucial not to give up hope. It is crucial to renew our capacity for telepathy and magic. To tell stories and sing songs. And to think clearly when clear thinking is called for.
The medicine needed to support this renewal is a distillation of patience and faith along with a deep and abiding reverence for the power of the Underworld. We must form new tribes and build new laboratories and remind each other, again and again, that if we bring the spirit of love back to the realm of matter, the yin tendency toward entropy will reverse. Then the streams, rivers, and oceans of life will begin to flow again. Fish will return to the waters and birds to the sky, and all manner of fantastic dream creatures will walk easily between our imagination and the natural world. Past and future will embrace in this one ever-present moment and then, as we read in Hexagram 24 of the I Ching, “. . . the transformation of the old becomes easy. The old is discarded and the new is introduced.”