Finding Balance by Befriending the Dark: Musings on the New Moon, Autumn, and Persephone

In this moon cycle, we have just passed the threshold of the autumn equinox. The autumn equinox is a really beautiful time of year that is also quite challenging—especially for people who live in our productivity-focused and fast-paced culture.The summer is a very energetic time, and when we start approaching autumn, it becomes really clunky for us as nature asks us to slow down. It's like life is trying to pump the brakes, and it is in our nature to try to fight it. When we resist this process of slowing down to match the energy of the season, things start to go wonky, we get sick, we become burnt out and exhausted.

Autumn equinox is a time to really look at balance. Summer is on one side of the pendulum swing: There's lots of growth, action, productivity, fun, and energy. And now we have arrived in the center, where everything is pulled into balance. It's a beautiful time to look at where in your life you can call in the other parts of yourself that weren't being nurtured during the summer months.

If you think of summer and winter as yang and yin, this is a time for calling in yin, or the darkness within us, to find that balance.

This is a time to befriend the dark and cultivate reverence for endings.

As the trees are losing their leaves, as the plants are dying back and the energy is going down into the soil, there is a sense of completion happening in nature. And nature is always a mirror in which we can gaze upon at least a thread of our own process. Autumn, for me, is always a time for reflecting on the completions of cycles, the endings happening in my own life. When you think about what is valued in our mainstream culture, endings are not valued in the same way that beginnings are. We live in a very death-adverse culture.

So, to give attention the parts of life that are falling apart—the parts of life that are ending. the essential phase of the cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth—we are actually doing a service to living.

A cycle cannot be complete without the holy ending. Death is where life finds meaning, it is where balance can be restored.

What I am really talking about here is wholeness. The wholeness of life, which is reflected within ourselves as our ability to fully occupy the spectrum of one’s humanness. Equinox is a place in time of balance between the light and the dark, only because the darkness is welcomed back in recognition of its essential place in the wholeness of life and the self.

The story of Persephone’s descent to the underworld in Greek mythology is so powerful for this theme, as it explains the existence of these cycles of life and death in nature. There are many versions of the story, and many interpretations. I will not tell the full myth here, but if you know it, you know that the story goes like this: Persephone, the daughter of Demeter the goddess of the harvest, was in her maidenhood when Hades comes up from the underworld to kidnap her. There are modern feminist interpretations of this myth that portrays Persephone in a more empowered way that says that she chose to go with him to the underworld. Some stories say that it was love, her own free will drawing her into the belly of the Earth.

I believe there is a bit of truth in both. While I appreciate the retelling that emphasizes Persephone’s empowerment of choice, I know better than to swallow a tale that portrays one walking willingly into the underworld. Most times, if you get pulled into the underworld, you go kicking and screaming. The underworld initiation process is essential, beautiful, alluring, and terrifying. It requires us to encounter death, grief, fear; It is not that the Underworld is bad, but the underworld is a deeply uncomfortable place to be. It is magnetic and also repulsive. The underworld is alluting because I believe that we know, deep in our bones, as humans, that that place of darkness is where we truly encounter ourselves and our gifts. We know it intuitively, and we seek it out whether consciously or not. And yet, I sense that Persephone had been dragged kicking and screaming down into the underworld despite the curiosity, allurement, and draw toward the edge of it.

That is how the underworld journey tends to go for us humans. When we feel the call, that it is our time to engage with our depths and befriend the dark, we feel along the edges of the precipice between what we thought we knew about ourselves and life and the great unknown. And, it seems, that the underworld has a way of reaching up and snatching us when we are not quite ready, but just ready enough to survive the fall. So she gets pulled into the underworld. Or she choses the underworld. Or, she simply goes, captivated in the truest sense of the word by her holy longing.

Then comes the grief of Demeter, who withers the whole of life on Earth, A profound grief which, again, is mirrored not only in the land but also in our own relationship with loss. Demeter’s grief is so devastating that it brings autumn and winter. By the time Persephone is reached, she has already tasted fruit of the underworld, binding her to the underworld for half the year. The important part, however, is in the sweetness of the pomegranate seeds. Persephone, in the depths of her journey to a dark place avoided by most, tasted sweetness there. Seeds of deep wisdom.

In our own personal underworld journeys, yes, we tend to go kicking. Yes, it's terrifying. Yes, it is confronting. And, it is where we are able to connect with our deepest purpose. It's in our wounds and in our darkness that we're able to find those seeds of who we really are and bring them up to the surface with us.

And so, as Persephone is guided back to the middle world, she becomes like a fully initiated adult, no longer a maiden, but the queen of the underworld. She is a reminder of the power that you walk away with from the dark places within you. You actually are able to integrate the entirety of who you are, the power of who you are, the wholeness of who you are when you're. able to hold both your light and your dark, both your conscious and subconscious, the soul and the ego. And that's where your true power lies, in those dark places. You'll hear from poet after poet, time and time again, that going into the underworld, into the darkness, is your path to truth.