Persephone after Dark: The Way to Wholeness (True Love Lessons)
Persephone learned to walk from darkness to light with ease, her steps inspiring flowers to bloom in spring, her descent allowing fallen leaves to grieve and nourish the soil. So should we.
“I walked myself hand in hand through the darkness, led by fear. This time, I didn’t run but walked towards it. Like holding a child’s tiny hands, her fingers wrapped in mine, I strode in slow, but steady steps. Down we went through a dark tunnel, cave-like, and at its deepest depths I found no one, but me. I found myself with darkened looks, heavy-lidded eyes under a sharp fringe, dark brown hair, and purple lips. She held her eyes in mine with a smirk. It felt like we met before. The child I held by the hand dissolved into me as my fears slipped away.
I was no longer afraid.”
- scene from a dream
Running Towards Darkness
We often run from darkness.
We fear the unknown, that which we don’t understand. Running towards what we fear is counter-intuitive, but the only way to understand and overcome fear itself.
Ultimately, we fear death — not as it actually is, but as we imagine it.
A primal fear, death is often translated as physical suffering to the surface of our thoughts. Digging deeper, what awaits at the end of the tunnel isn’t the literal death of our bodies, but that of parts of ourselves which need to go. When we dive in to face our true self as who we have become, we might miss who we were, who we’ve been, but that no longer exists.
What we fear isn’t death, but life itself, all the cycles inherent to it. Its beginnings and endings. We fear growth. By holding back, we hold on to fear as a protector, aiming to defend our status quo: we stick to who we are, today.
Fear represents the protective mother, who loves us, but deems us small: a helpless child in need of care. The subconscious mother wants to makes sure nothing will harm us, but it comes at a high cost. We won’t change, nor grow. Ultimately, we won’t live.
This protective feeling, dressed up in fear, dissolves as we face what we’ve been running from. As we visit the dark place we initially avoided. Life pushes us to do so through unexpected paths. Want it not, we stumble on our fears. Daring to face them, you may find that you feared meeting new versions of yourself, which implies the death of someone you held dear: yourself as you were (or imagined it).
As we live, we change. Anything static, is not life.
The start of your new self implies the end of another, who might struggle to stay alive — even when it has been agonizing, for long.
Meeting Darkness Inside
At the depth of my tunnel, I met darkness itself. It knows and accepts itself and all around it. What I feared was nowhere, but inside me. Once I met her — and her power — it became clear it is her who my fears led to.
There, at the end of the road, my fears dissipated. She knows not to fear because she is the end of the journey. Fierce, fearless, she holds all the wisdom of death, of ending cycles, with a smirk. She is not cruel, nor evil. These are aspects of fear rejected, unworked with. We suffer when we fight the flow of life, creating hell itself by getting stuck halfway, in fear, instead of walking all the way to meet our darkness and be whole. We often just survive in a sufferable state of anxiety, afraid of change.
The darkness I met at the end of the tunnel is quiet and confident. She feels familiar as if we met before. There, I found a peaceful place, one of acceptance. Where we take everything as it is. A place of true, unconditional love. She knows to be the other side of the moon, the side we’ve learned not to accept, but which we can’t avoid. Darkness has seen it all. So, she lets it be. She is inseparable from life. She’s death, and she’s rebirth. She’s winter, cloudy days, and resting weekends. She’s the quiet kind of smart, like snakes slithering silently on the ground. She’s earth decomposing organic matters before it becomes fertile soil. She’s also life. And she’s the end of the wheel -from where everything starts over.
She knows when things should stay and go — and so, she knows no fear, but flows with the free will of time. She dances to it, wildly alive. She’s full while being empty. She’s full potentiality.
Let’s go deeper.
The Loving Way to Darkness
People you care about the most are likely to be those who cause you the biggest pain. They crack you open to an excruciating level of vulnerability, resurfacing shadows you had buried deep.
Deep relationships bring out your whole self, including the parts you dislike. It might have felt safer to keep those suppressed, hidden from yourself and everyone. Those, who triggered your whole self to come to light — even the parts you kept in the dark — are likely to be lighting the way to unconditional love.
They bid you love, even your darkness. Because we can’t love only half of us.
There is often fear, pain, and rejection when dealing with darkness because we learned to avoid it. As Frozen’s Elsa would sing in a perfect metaphor: “conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know.”
Once you dare to walk towards your darkness, you not only find it had always been there as an old friend, but recognize it as the most fearless part of you. In meeting darkness, you are whole.
Wholeness, Emptiness and Full Potentiality
The space you avoided is one of full potentiality, where you are nothing — and you know it. Where you expect nothing, for it is the endpoint.
Death as we fear it is that space of grief and ashes. Death in fact is the space to which everything returns, and it knows it. This space, death itself, knows not fear. It understands that from the very end, the deepest depths, only one thing emerges: life.
Can one get lost in darkness? We get lost on the way to it. Fear holds us back. Avoiding it, the limbo, a lethargic state of rejection (or non-acceptance), which implies that we are fighting the flow of life. From such struggle, we become avoidant, stubborn, victims of life trying to prevent rivers from flowing and living in death as we fear it: a state of stagnation.
What hurts isn’t that everything alive will die, but that we fear it.
Fear steals the moment while it is still alive.
Darkness invites us to enjoy life as it flows.
When death feels near and your fears approach, experiment walking ahead towards it with resolve and greet your dark edges like an old friend. Feel fear as it dissipates.
Then, you are one with the flow of life. Take time to honor what is gone — the old ways in which you used to live, create, and relate to others, opening space for the unknown versions of you, to become. Rest assured, from this, the new is born. Receive it with childlike enthusiasm. Live green leaves sprouting, blooming into pale rose petals, rising from the dark grounds within you.
And know darkness is always there, whenever you need a friendly reminder that “this, too, shall pass”.
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Posted in celebration to the darkest day, longest night of the year in the Southern Hemisphere. Now, the only way is up. Walking towards light — aware darkness is always here. Until we meet again, happy Winter’s Solstice!
