Hic sunt dracones

Photo by Emanuela Meli on Unsplash

A poetic musing, not an upbeat remedy or light ritual but a little self-heal cathartic dark night of the soul writing. Indulge me reader. For from the darkness, there is the birth of light.

….

It feels like a black sun and inverse tree, earthly norms as we know them descending down the serpent’s embrace into a reverse world, a world of shells. An imbalance. A peel, a husk, an unreal new normal as we bunker down inside its hibernating subterranean roots. We’re in the shadows. Here be dragons indeed. Like Odin upside down for the count of 9 (months, years???) or the hanged man tarot. Lilith Queen of the night rules down here, in the realms of the reversed normal. It’s light is washed out, the colour is off, wrong – with a soulless tinge. Ruling the Aquarian cycles of air, is tightening Saturn’s firm grip, an oppressive Kronos slowly killing time until the great filter. Lovecraft would feel at home here in this diabolical sphere beneath the blood of the earth - among infernal fossils of the last Industrial Age. A death march for the past two centuries, a fin de siècle for our old normals. 

It’s a twisted fairytale, a garland not of roses but of thorns, with a crown of thistles not string of pearls. What phoenixes will rise from this alchemy into a brave new world, what doves can possibly descend? 

Backwards and downwards we must journey, through quest without human contact, mouths guarded behind masks and hands sanitised. How can soul and self flourish in this hermetic seal? 

How? By turning this Great Turning around. By gardening under moonlight to disinfect cognitive fear from the homo sapien iOS. By optimistic positive and active hope in a future, a better one for all species and planet. By dreaming of promethean soaring wings, not writhing with worms. As the summer solstice soon approaches (June 21 in the northern hemisphere - the Stonehenge ceremony being brought to you via Zoom this weird summer) can we emerge from our womblike dark blind slumber into light, rewilded and reborn? As the sun’s rays dance around our visceral corporeal beauty, can we illuminate and warm the locked-down circuit breaking soft bodies. Can we return better than whence we came? A (as Joanna Macy calls it) “coming back to life” and a crafting of a scary new one, our of comfort zones and beyond paradigms.

Warriors, rising to join Artemis’ army in the metaphorical woods. Accept - as Jem Bendell calls it - this “invitation of the uncertainty and sense of impermanence“ (and thus the mercurial liminal non-binary changeability it heralds) as an “opportunity to experience life more fully”. Alive and kicking ass.

There are many possible futures we could build coming out of the dark, but one with hope is the way we need to light an Abre Camino candle and novena for. This is not Pollyanna-ish, rather just resourceful and on the side of life, authenticity, the earth and ‘livingness’. For all species, ad astra.

Can we re-enchant ourselves now? Can we pole vault and hurdle the oncoming technical flood like an Olympian athlete in empty stadia with pumped in audience atmosphere? New Noahs in new iArks. In our collective healing can we reclaim the real and reject the fake? Can we even see what fake is anymore? Are we in the map or the VR territory? 

Can we revivify and embrace our natural biological rhythms and limits, refusing upgrades and augmentation in an encroaching clockwork mechanical cold universe.

With tissues, marrow, blood and bone – we will heal, naturally. Exhausted but not extinct. Is this time an era of hospitality or of hospital or of hospice? Can we be a human contagion of love?

May we dance cosmically both here on the ground and in future descendants through star systems. May we revision soul and ensoul a living magical world. May we be a living flame of life. 

May we become and yet, un-become. Un-robotic, un-evolved and yet more than the sum of our cellular parts. Verdant, green, goddess, wild, raw, real, holy, higher and glorious.

Exhausted but not extinct. Exhausted but not extinct. Exhausted - but NOT extinct.