Fall Waxing Harvest Moon
60 pink daffodils have a new home in the soil surrounding two cherry trees and a pear tree. These trees are the first ones visible out our kitchen window, so the blooms will cheer us up as spring begins to break winter’s hold next year. Bulb planting relies on, requires darkness. Beauty, like Snow White, goes to sleep beneath the autumn sun and lies as dead all winter long. With the kiss of the sun prince flowers emerge. Perhaps the years I’ve spent planting bulbs in great numbers, as many as 800 in some years, triggered my affection for darkness. In the first few years of daffodils, hyacinth, tulips, snowdrops and croci I often thought of those bulbs, covered in snow and cold, waiting out the winter in their castle of food and nascent stalks, leaves and flowers, a feeling similar to the one I get now when I’m at work in the garden and a bee, a bee from Artemis Hives, alights on a flower near me. Both of us, insect and human, have valuable work to perform in the garden and we labor there as colleagues in every sense. The patience and persistence of the bulbs beneath the snows and cold of December and January has always touched me, a sweet feeling, a well-wishing for them in their lonely underground redoubts.
That’s part of the darkness focus. Another, earlier part, came when I began to feel uneasy with spiritual metaphors that took me up and out of my body. Heaven. Prayers that go up. God being out there. The minister lifted up above the congregation. A sense that the better part of existence lies beyond the body and this moment, somewhere high and far away. I began a search for spiritual metaphors that took me down and in. Jungian psychology helped me in this search, but the clincher came after I had decided to study Celtic history in preparation for writing my first novels. A trip to north Wales and two weeks in a residential library there tipped me to the existence of holy wells, springs that had sacred meaning to early Celtic religious life, long before the arrival of Christianity. Here was a metaphor that went down and if used in meditation, could stimulate a spiritual journey in the same direction, no longer trying to get out of the body or up and far away.
The spiritual pilgrimage that began from that point has led me on an inner journey, into the deep caverns and cathedrals of my own Self, traveling them and finding the links between my Self and the larger spiritual universe, the connection not coming on an upward path, but on the ancientrail of Self-exploration. I do not seek to go into the light, but into the caves.
