Fall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Harvest Moon<\/p>\n
60 pink daffodils have a new home in the soil surrounding two cherry trees and a pear tree.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bulb planting relies on, requires darkness.\u00a0 Beauty, like Snow White, goes to sleep beneath the autumn sun and lies as dead all winter long.\u00a0 With the kiss of the sun prince flowers emerge.\u00a0 Perhaps the years I’ve spent planting bulbs in great numbers, as many as 800 in some years,\u00a0 triggered my affection for darkness.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Both of us, insect and human, have valuable work to perform in the garden and we labor there as colleagues in every sense.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
That’s part of the darkness focus.\u00a0 Another, earlier part, came when I began to feel uneasy with spiritual metaphors that took me up and out of my body.\u00a0 Heaven.\u00a0 Prayers that go up.\u00a0 God being out there.\u00a0 The minister lifted up above the congregation.\u00a0 A sense that the better part of existence lies beyond the body and this moment, somewhere high and far away.\u00a0\u00a0 I began a search for spiritual metaphors that took me down and in.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0 the body or up and far away.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I do not seek to go into the light, but into the caves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fall\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waxing Harvest Moon 60 pink daffodils have a new home in the soil surrounding two cherry trees and a pear tree.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Bulb planting relies on, requires darkness.\u00a0 … Continue reading In and Down<\/span>