Nothing teaches you the patience life requires better than life itself.  A basic axiom that even kicking and fighting each of us are tasked to learn: Letting go. That is the medicine I am finding myself practicing this week, as we enter the stillness of the lunar reset, the void chaos-rest space of the balsamic moon.  I don’t know about you guys but my energy is sure on that wane.  Being reminded of the power and the struggle: accepting that over other people, and over the variety of possible manifestations of the future in the right now, I have no control.

Ohhh life!!  And how I’ve learned and relearned!  That in letting go, space is always created.  And spaciousness allows softness, tenderness, the capacity to move, to relax, to receive.  To grow…

This is the medicine of right now on the year’s wane.  This week’s new moon is the gnostic entry into the Underworld, the third and final harvest rite.  The women’s wisdom or celtic earth path calls this Lunar Samhain and the women in my women’s circle seemed all to resonate to the same theme: Finally, We Enter Darkness.  Sacred Invitation to Rest.

First, however, the pitch and UnRest!  Of Lunar Samhain.

Traditional Samhain, known also as the more mundane Halloween, is about the relationship between peak fruition of fertility into the lean of life force completing its whole potentiality by decreasing and dying. We hate death and dying, ward off the dark by dressing up as the creatures and monsters we fear at Halloween.  But what of the wisdom? What of the medicine of the dark?  Letting go and surrendering is a process of absorbing and reflecting all at once, holding all the growth and reintegrating all of the different aspects this year of “Us”.  Accepting, no judgment, no shame.  All of the experiences that lived through you and who and how you’ve been shaped.   This is now a distilling process, clarification by review of all this, and release…

And that can feel tense, flat.  Still.  Exhausting.  Remember, it is the dark moon motion to hold us in a entropy feel.  The moon cycle that will come after will increase the length of nighttime darkness more and more until winter is ushered in.  For me, with a small gentle sigh and lean, it has felt like the active alchemy of opening my heart even though I don’t want to because it’s getting dark!! but trust is an action word, so allowing what I am carrying this year, all that I have fed and tended and grown, to fulfill its course with or without my control.

Patience, acceptance, letting go.  Lunar Samhain:  trusting the process of dark, of what we can not see.  Of the passive power of energy wane, of decrease… and renewal.

Harvest season exists the world around and is one of the most ancient of all rites. Every person every place has a place that raised her and as long as there’s been life on MaMa Earth, this holds true.  Her seasons move in increase and decrease, and so at Samhain we allow this letting go.  It is time too of the religious holidays of All Saints and All Souls Days and Sukkoth, as well as the reverence for ancestors and death as a divine power of life during Los Dias De Los Muertes, and is also connected to a variety of both ancient goddess venerations and modern agricultural festivals.  The weather changes, it is reflected in the length and depth of dark shadows, the steady motion of wind whisper in the tops of trees, the burnish bronze of late season light in the leaves and colors.  We go on hayrides, drink hot cider, pick pumpkins and other seasonal gourds.

I like the earth path because our custom as American’s is the Harvest tradition of Thanksgiving, but gently tending blessings and harvests now, and letting go and space-making through out the Fall usually helps me walk into the holidays mindfully and with minimal chaos.  This week especially we mind mind, note tensions and what is living, what is lost.  What makes us feel uncomfortable if we have to hold still!  We note life’s living/letting go wisdom, the transient power of bittersweet joy/pain over getting to experience without always being able to control.  When we consider the station of Fall and the West on the medicine wheel, we think of sunset, of that precious moment of last light on the horizon.  We recall that ultimately, all things pass.

And the new day will come again.

And so it is often my practice at Samhain tide to revere, among my blessings of the year and what must be let go, my ancestors.  When I remember those that are no longer here, I see the ways in which I am a living growing example of their seeds.  What a miracle this is, how I get to be tilling the ground for my own life’s accumulations and legacies tomorrow, and how none of that could’ve happened without my own ancestral and community webs.

From what and where do we seek our values, and how?  How do we practice this, and how do our energies align?  What is our legacy, what will we leave?  How do we repay the gifts our elders have bestowed upon us, and how do we practice accountability and responsibility to any ruptures, injuries, or wounds? To whom are we connected, and how?  Am I accountable?

How are my relations?  There is not a more powerful time in our history, as far as the four short decades I have been here that is, to ask questions like these.

The power of consciousness:  choosing to witness and be mindful in your own life.  To say thanks, to tend your tides of growth and release, of the season’s fruits being turned back to the earth. Marking with reverence the accompanying cycles of letting go, rest, renewal, death, rebirth.  Knowing that all we can do is be true to our own self right now, and take whatever small actions we can just for today, allowing the heart to soften into the knowing of right now is plenty, is enough, embodying such wisdom… These, the lessons of reflection put into practice as the natural season ushers in the Underworld this week with Lunar Samhain.  How that can burn, to open the heart in such a posture of releasing and allowing, how it can feel so counter to life’s frenzy, to pause right now.  Be still.  Be still with the wane.  The release. Acknowledge the power of the season of the dark.