Just A Little Bleeding

This is going to be a long read, but since you're on a writer's page, you might even be hoping for that. Still here?

Okay, So 2018 has been a challenging year for me, physically, emotionally and spiritually. I feel like I'm being shredded from the inside out, the soil from which I grow torn apart, sifted, examined...cleaned and enriched.

Over the last six months or so, much of which time has been spent recovering from various injuries I now know weren't random, I'm plundering beliefs, perceptions, experiences and...relationships. I'm sorting through all of this with as much authenticity, as much honesty as I can bare, ruthlessly tearing away noxious weeds, severing unhealthy relationships, while at the same time, trying to face my own mistakes, the darkness in my own heart, with a vigilance I've never braved before.

I never set out to do this. It was part of no resolution and I do not have a list I'm checking off. I take things on as I trip over them in my path.

At the same time, I face physical challenges that mirror the internal ones. In both cases, these challenges, once healed, could manifest a future so magical I can't even imagine. If I can pull off all this healing. It's all a marvel, really, to what end I can only theorize, but I see God's hand in all of it.

This morning, I came across my friend, Debbie Higgs,' post and was blown away by the truths, the messages, in myths. If you've got a moment more, read Debbie's post, which she credits to her friend, Chani Nicholas:

Your rage is sacred, holy ground. Proof that you are human. That the events that tried to break you have left their mark upon you. That the pain of your past, and that of generations past, is emerging through you. Wanting to be held by you. Brought to consciousness by you. Transformed by being spoken into existence by you.

Your rage waits for you to call it by its name.

Speak it. Translate it. Transcribe it. Plaster it up and down the halls that house abusers of power. In giant font. In wailing screams. In and through the vibrations true to you.

Pour your rage into your projects. Create ceremonies to honor it. Therapy sessions to hold it. Read the myths that contextualize it.

Find friendships that validate your rage. Communities that are galvanized by the conscious use of their own. Actions that channel it towards some kind of relief and release.

If your rage is showing up, if your pain is calling upon you, if the hurt that you have harbored for years is erupting, it trusts you enough to receive it.

Until we work with it, our rage, pain, and grief exists beneath the surface of everything we do. Seething. Soaking into and poisoning our best intentions. Contorting our hearts into shapes too collapsed to house the love we so desire. Wrapping itself around our life-force, strangling our creativity, staving off what is rightfully ours.

Stationing retrograde on October 5th, at 10° of Scorpio, Venus, planet of love, connection, relationships, women, femmes, femininity, and desire, reveals her other side. When Venus retrogrades we get to work with all that is in opposition to it. The experiences that evoke our most difficult emotions refuse to be ignored. One of Venus’s many retrograde lessons is that the abuse of all things Venus is old and deep. Wide and ready to be acknowledged. This goddess is hungry for justice too long withheld from her.

Retrograding every 18-months, the myths associated with Venus’s backward motion are of the goddess’s great descent. Venus was known as Inanna by the Sumerians. Her famous underworld journey is a tale of reckoning, awakening, and integrating the powerful material of the unconscious into consciousness.

Called one day by her sister, Ereshkigal, goddess of the underworld, Inanna descends to her realm. Ereshkigal is the opposite to Inanna’s beauty, glory, and adoration. She is the sister betrayed. Feared. Unloved. Alone. Rejected. Her pain has distorted her. Her hunger for love left unjustly unfulfilled. Ereshkigal is the aspect of Inanna, the aspect of us all, that lives just under the surface waiting for our consciousness to open to its call.

When she reaches her sister in the underworld, Inanna is met with a death stare that annihilates her. Her corpse is then hung on meat hooks, left to rot where no one can reach her. The only beings that come to her aid are two magical helpers who appease Ereshkigal by witnessing her pain, acknowledging it and mirroring her struggle back to her. These beings echo Ereshkigal’s cries and wails. For the first time Ereshkigal is relieved of her pain because she is related to. Accepted. Given some compassion for her struggle. In return for this kindness she gifts them Inanna’s body and the goddess is reborn. Ascending to the Great Above, Inanna is renewed, but is never the same. Now fully awakened by coming into contact with the pain of her other half, Innana is, for the first time, a Queen truly worthy of her crown.

Ereshkigal is the deep reservoirs of power that lay within the unconscious. We cannot come into contact with our full potential until we are willing to descend into our underworlds, reckoning with the truth of what has happened to us. The struggle of marrying the unconscious and the conscious, the Queen of the Great Above, and the Queen of the Great Below, is a process of transformation so intense and painful we can only do it in the underworld. We need deep caverns, incubators, and safe places to grieve and reunite with ourselves.

The collective rage that is being unleashed in this moment is incredible. Undeniable. Irreversible. Ancient. This has been a year of opening ourselves to the howls of Ereshkigal. We are all being asked to meet her, acknowledge her pain, and invite in the lessons and wisdom of this myth. We are not above the forces that threaten to pull us under, but we are undoubtedly made more whole when we can hold space for our broken and still beautiful selves....