Darkness & Light: The Halves of the Whole
03.03: Equinox Advent
This article is for EVERYONE!
First a note to my free subscribers: I think I made a mistake in sending out my last post. It was late and I thought that if I sent it to all subscribers, then everyone could get part of the article despite there being a paywall. After more thought, I wondered if maybe it isn’t so great to just get half an article in your inbox, especially in the context of this ongoing advent. I don’t know. I’m still figuring out how to balance paid/ free subscribers and make everyone feel welcome. Substack also has some quirks that throw me- like if I put even just one pdf behind a paywall, then the article is classified as paid and no one else can comment. Anyway. I made this post free to make it up to you and also so I could reach out and explain. I don’t take for granted the privilege of being invited into your inbox and I don’t want it to seem otherwise! ❤️
Today’s lecture: A Very Brief Introduction to the Wheel of the Year, the Yin Yang, and the Power of Opposites.
(Coming at you late because someone got carried away with diagrams. Wouldn’t be the same without them, though!)
I’ve packed a lot in here, so if anything doesn’t add up, or if it just gets you curious, pop your questions down in the comments. Since this post is public, everyone should be able to do so. 🎉 🎉
Oh- and don’t miss the bring-it-to-life assignment at the bottom of this article!
••••
We live in a linear world. Though we’ve supposedly evolved from the ‘straight and narrow’ of the puritanical Christians that shaped many influential centuries of our (written) history, the truth is we still inhabit a very narrow corridor of what is allowed, what is acceptable, what can or can’t be said/ asked/ tried/ etc. Rather than shaking off those limiting values, they are embedded in the foundations of our society.
The good news is that, for all its size and relentlessness, this linear world isn’t the real world. It’s only an exoskeleton- manmade- superimposed over the real, Natural, world.
The world of Nature has linear aspects, but for the most part it speaks the language of circles and spirals. With unruly coastlines, extravagant clouds, outrageous mating rituals, ungovernable weather patterns, and unrepentant creatures in every direction, it’s clear that Nature lives by a very different code from the uniform framework laid across it.
We see Nature’s circles everywhere, but the ones that forever have my heart are the ones you can’t see with your eyes: the circle from morning to day to evening to night and back to morning. The cycles of the moon, the year, of life to death to life.
Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle.
The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round.
Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.
Our tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.
•Black Elk•
Because humans are of Nature themselves and will forever be beckoned by it- either the external beckoning of the wild, or the internal beckoning of our own impulses, dreams, and appetites- the parasitic linear world is heavily dependent on gimmicks to keep us from straying. Two popular techniques include fear-mongering (biggies are the demonization of dirt, the sun, and other outside things; the ongoing drama of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’; eternal damnation, ‘us’ vs ‘them’…. the list is endless) and bribery/ distraction (the centuries-long parade of mesmerizing gadgets, toys, ‘conveniences’, and trends that make up this thing we call ‘progress’).
There are delights in Nature and there are dangers, but Nature doesn’t employ them to dominate or coerce. It’s all just part of Her stunningly intricate system.
Nature offers us what society could never: wholeness. In this system, all of you is welcome- all of you is needed! There’s no internal war with self, no slicing off of toes to fit yourself into society’s glass slipper.
And in this wholeness, there is healing. Whole, after all, is the origin of the word heal.
As it happens, our early ancestors also wanted to understand this wholeness and, observing patterns, started to loosely categorize the ‘everything’ around them as a way of making sense the world they lived in. This scientific data lives on in the Yin and Yang of China, the elements of Ayurveda from India, the Medicine Wheels of the Americas, the cosmological drums of the Arctic Sami, the three-fold system of the Celts…. and many more.
All of these worldviews vary in the details, but are strikingly similar in their wonder, their humility, and their rippling aliveness. Unlike (linear) modern science, they banish nothing and avoid absolutes. They knew that rigidity could only hinder attempts to understand something as dynamic and complex as the entire world.
All of these are round.'
The circle represents the whole and from there, it seems to me, the most intuitive way to start organizing that is into two halves. The year is also round and divided, by the equinoxes, into two halves.
We are approaching one of those dividing points between the two halves of the equinox. The name suggests balance, but in practice it can feel more like between pulled apart in two opposite directions. And in a way, you are…..
Nature is pulling you apart, or seen in a different light: inviting you to expand, showing you all the life, all the possibility that you’ve been kept from. Going from a linear paradigm to a circular one involves a lot of uncomfortable stretching. Almost everything is beyond our tight comfort corridor. But with that stretching comes resilience and acceptance- of the world, yes, but especially of yourself.
So let’s start to look at these two halves. The two sides aren’t concrete and the opposites within them aren’t antagonistic in the way opposites often are in our society (gotta have a good side and the bad side!). Rather than staring each other down like opponents on either side of an imaginary line, each pair are eternally bonded, co-creating their own little whole within the larger one. The Yin Yang expresses this flowing, complementary tension exquisitely. Looking again to Nature, we see that opposite halves like day and night don’t observe strict borders, but fade and mingle together as if they spend their 12 hours apart longing for the other.
The two general categories are known as Yin and Yang, Dark and Light, Lunar and Solar, or, controversially, Feminine and Masculine (a topic for another time, but keep this in mind as you read on about the life-creating qualities of the Dark/ Yin/ Lunar half…..).
Allow me to introduce you.
Everything starts in the dark.
From babies of all species, to ideas, to plants, to works of art, to feelings, to the words you speak. In almost any creation story from any continent, the world came out of darkness, often through some combination of earth and water.
Earth and Water also just happen to be the elements of the dark half of the year (when the nights are longer than the days). Water for fall, Earth for winter: together, the mud or clay of creation.
Whether literally- as in the watered soil that grows the food that supports all life- or figuratively- the mythological clay that formed the world, or the world’s first inhabitants- Earth and Water are the primary ingredients needed for the creation of life. Air and Fire are also critical, they just come along a little later in the process.
The dark half is analogous to the Yin half of the Yin Yang. It holds our roots, our histories, our core beings when all affectations are stripped away. But despite this quality of pastness, the cyclical patterns of Nature mean that we revisit here again and again- to rest, to regenerate, to remember, to review.
The light half grows up out of the dark half as spring rises from winter. It is all that is visible or aboveground: the flowers sprouting from hidden roots, the birds soaring far from their nests and the eggs they hatched from, the butterfly leaving behind its cocoon, the rabbit venturing away from its burrow, the hero embarking on a journey far from home (sustained by the lunch packed by his mother).
The light half is upward growth and fruition, it is joy, play, awards, success, progress, ambition, followers, material goods. If this list seems like it’s headed into dangerous territory, that’s because in our society the qualities of light have become untethered from the dark.
In balance, light and dark, like day and night, feed each other. Out of balance, they feed on each other.
•••
This might feel like a lot to absorb, or it might feel disjointed and superficial. Both are true!
This is just data until you carry it around in your blood stream for a while, breathe some life into it (your life) and play with what it all means to you.
Going from linear to whole requires a lot of deconstruction- dismantling the fears and coping mechanisms that you developed in response to being born into this exquisite world and then finding yourself trapped in a corridor.
But Nature longs for you just as you long for Her. She’s just wanting for you to remember and reconnect with your birthrights of belonging and wholeness.
Assignment:
Use your journal to ponder opposites you encounter in your life (the list is endless) and play around with how to categorize them. Do they belong to the dark or the light? Why?
Then consider them through the good/ bad lens of our linear society: which of these categories does each one (and its opposite) fall into? Why? Who benefits from suppressing the one and elevating the other? What ramifications do you see from this?
Now make a list of some of your own qualities, some that you like and some that you have a harder time accepting. How would you categorize them through a)Nature’s light/ dark lens and b)society’s good/bad lens? Do the qualities shift depending on the lens?
And finally, what are the opposites of your more and less desirable qualities? How do you a)think, rationally, about these opposites and b)what feelings arise in response to them?
This is the path to learning Nature’s language and how to reweave ourselves back into Her system. This is the path of wholeness.
Tomorrow we’ll be building on this with the Day 04 printout. See you back here!