The Dance of Descent
At our most recent gathering we danced in honour of the Autumn Equinox (or Mabon as our Celtic ancestors called it). This is a particular moment in time and space, when the earth is poised between light and dark. It is one of only two days of the year when day and night are of equal length, and at this time we are descending, or moving into greater darkness, whereas in Spring, we move from the Equinox to growing light. It is a moment worth acknowledging for when we do, we honour the earth and her cycles. We acknowledge our place in the sensuous embodied dance of the earth around the sun, and we restore the sacred in our lives.
By turning up and honouring this Autumnal Equinox we become active participants in the story of the earth- and the larger cosmic story. Many of us have forgotten that we are part of this earth and that her story is our story too.[i] And in our forgetting we have become dislocated from her, and have laid waste to her. The earth and all her creatures are in trouble, there are so many ways to describe this trouble, climate change, species extinction, nuclear disasters, pollution, ozone depletion, famine and starvation are just a few….and so many of us are unhappy and unfulfilled. We are missing something in our lives. To me that something is a sense of belonging, and connection to the earth.
We are homesick, homesick for the earth who creates us, nurtures us, feeds us, shelters us and enlivens us.[ii] She gives us everything and yet we have few rituals to honour all that she does. Publicly we have no days in celebration of her gifts of air, water, earth and fire. We do not acknowledge that these gifts are essential to our very being, that our beingness arises out of these elements, out of the earth herself, and so we feel rootless, homeless, and unsure of ourselves. Celebrating the seasons, the earth and her cycles, is a powerful way to remember our deep innate connection to earth. It restores our sense of unity and connection to the all that is.
The celebration of the Autumn Equinox and the other seasonal markers is a ritual which restores our relationship with the earth. It reminds us that we too are part of this cosmic dance, and that the cycles and rhythms of the earth are essential aspects of our being too. We are reunited with the earth and her stories. “Our ‘ground of being’ is rooted in the living universe just as surely as a tree is rooted in the soil and flows from the same wellspring of life as do all the rivers in the world.”[iii] And it is necessary now to remember our ground of being, both we and the earth are dependent upon a new story- or perhaps more appropriately a remembering and reframing of the old stories, in which our connection to the earth is honoured and celebrated. We need to ritualise our connection to the earth, to make sense of our place here on this planet.
In ancient Greece, the tale of Persephone is the story of a maiden who must descend into the depths of the earth to find her power and wisdom. Glennys Livingstone reminds us that Persephone made her descent at the Autumn Equinox.[iv] And we too must descend now, we must go into the core of our being to find the wisdom we need to restore and “restory” the earth and ourselves. For within our depths is the wisdom of the earth, within us are her stories, and her songs, her movement and her dances. “It is in the stillness of the soul, beneath the ceaseless chatter of the mind, that we can reconnect with the living powers of the Universe, to learn their language, hear their stories and songs, open to their wisdom”.[v] We can draw on this mythos as an allay in our life, acknowledging the need for reconnection to the earth, and importantly for the need to descend.
The Autumn Equinox is a celebration of the descent phase of the cycle. We live in a spiralling cyclical world in which everything dies and is born anew. This is the way of the earth. Everything is in relationship and the process of death and decay are essential components of life on earth. Death and life are aspects of the same cycle. And yet we with our linear thinking fail to understand the necessity and power of the descent. And so at our peril we ignore it.
We in the west in particular, are so focused on ourselves and on the ascent aspect of the cycle that we have forgotten the affirmations of the descent. We have forgotten to honour the periods of deep rest and nourishment, we have forgotten that life arises from death, and that decay and death must also be honoured. Instead our leaders talk only of growth, as if unlimited growth is ever possible, or even worth striving for. So when we honour the Autumn Equinox, we honour the descent, the journey into darkness and the deep nourishment that comes from Autumn and Winter, from fallen leaves and compost.
And in our honouring we can surrender to our grief and pain for the earth, and ourselves, we can let this grief truly be. There is so much grief. As livingstone says, when we let it wash over us, this grief can lead us to joy.[vi] We honour it, express it and fall into the depths, and here in the depths we meet her, we meet an expression of our maker, that creative “empty” potential, from which all life arises. In my own journeys into the dark I have experienced this profound connection- only after I fully surrendered to the tsunami of pain that is our sense of separation. From this moment of recognition I found the sacred connection , the web of all life throbbing and alive in me, the nothing and the everything existing all at once.
We can remember our deep connection through rituals which honour the seasonal moments. These are powerful reminders that we live in a rhythmic cyclic world, that everything is in fact rhythm. We are reassured by this deep innate sense of rhythm in our lives. We are not alone, we are a party of this great symphony we call live on earth- and more too. We are part of the universe story. As David Bohm says, “Reality is a single unbroken wholeness in flowing movement”[vii] And thus a celebratory dance honouring this continuous flow is a dynamic expression of this rhythm and our place in it….
And so we dance, we dance to the rhythms of our body, to the da dub da dub of our heart, the swoon of our blood, the ebb and flow of our lymphatic system, and the slow deep dance of our cells creating and destroying, birthing and dying. We dance to awaken ourselves to the divine harmony that is our reality. We give thanks to the earth and her dance around the sun, and we give thanks to the descent phase after the abundance of the late summer harvest, we give thanks for the opportunity to let go and release, to be returned to earth. We dance like a leaf falling and fallen to the earth, resting in her belly.
Importantly in any celebration we connect to the place where we are. We connect to the season and to the plants, the birds, the soil. In our dance we always create an altar of found objects, windfall, parts of nature that speak to us of what is happening in our lives in this moment. We find comfort and accord in acknowledging this reality, here and now. So while we draw on great myths and stories of our ancestors, we listen too, to the stories and dance of this place. We acknowledge that this is the home of the Bunnerong, and the Kulin Nations. We acknowledge their seasonal stories, and know that this time of descent, of Manemit, is still a time of harvest as the cooler weather brings birds and relief. Here in my own garden, the Eastern Spinebill returns to the garden at Autumn, taking the nectar from the deep throats of correas and salvias. We too sip from the nectar of life. When we dance our seasonal dance, we celebrate the earth and her gifts. We feel a deep sense of wonder and joy at the creative power of the descent, and our place in the cycles of life/death/life.
[i] See Swimme and Berry .,The Universe Story, From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Eco Zoic Era-A Celebration of the Unfolding Universe., Harper San Francisco,1992
[ii] Connelly, Dianne M. All Sickness is Home Sickness, Columbia, Maryland: Centre for Traditional Acupuncture, 1986, in Hartley, Wisdom of the Moving Body, North Atlantic Books, 1995
[iii] Maya Freeman, Prophetic Voices of the Sisters of Honua in MysticMumma www.mysticmumma.com
[iv] Livingstone, The Equinox as a Story of Redemption; Sacred Balance of Maternal Creativity, at www.pagain.org, 2015
[v] Maya Freeman, op cit.
[vi] Livingstone, ibid
[vii] Bohm quoted in Casey, Caroline., Visionary Activist Astrology, Sounds True.
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