Category Archives: 6 Shadow

Perching Before Samhain

Grandmother pulls her shroud
and the rains, the warm rains,
it rains inside this endless cup of grey.

Grandfather blows his crisp leaves
and the smell, the earthly smell, 
the smell brings me to myself.

Tis the blessed season of endless twilight, 
of richly dressed sunrises,
of memories fine, memories drawn,
memories, ancient borne,
come from the crack of the horizon.

As I gaze through branches brown,
sienna tangled in my hair
I know my home, my home,
my earthly, earth home.

She waits for me in the shape of a rook,
on the other side,
in a cave,
in the dank
the darkness.

And I savor the moment, her beckoning,
for she is no longer my huntress, my dread.
She is my mistress, my mother, my crone.

For I have been through canyons dark, seen mirrors sharp.
I have walked the valley of the dead,
been tangled on the rocks with no matter,
I have been, again and again.

Under the wraiths’ long cry,
the songs I could not hear
the banshee did not lie,
and then I found my footing.

She has shown me the way, through myself and back again.
And this time.. I relish the time, the time.

Tasara

Death

I see Death in the darkness.
It sidles up to me and says, “You are depressed.”
It says, “Here, I have sickness.” It says, “Look at your rage.”

And I say, “Yes I see it. There is a seat at my table for you. Please. Sit.”

I call in the Healing Darkness, this darkness velvety deep
and in course I feel an embrace that slips into my secrets,
those spaces where my despair is known by no one but me.

The healing Love says,

“I am with you.
You are known.
I am holding you.”

Tears soft slide, quench soul-thirst, release.

There are glowing beings around me,
unseen,
they are moving,
glowing as no other could but in a place such as this.

I say, “Sit. Eat with me, Death. There is much to talk about.”

and we gleam, looking far into each other.

A feast awaits us in the deep winter.

The Hag

When the hag invites you to tea, beware, because she is going to eat you for dinner. You will go down to her cave beneath the oldest oak tree and hang your hat on her door. It will start off nice, but everything you thought you wanted or needed will be stripped away with her look from across the table. Her gaze will stop time, it will, as the blood rushes from your veins.

She will say without saying it, “I have seen you and I see you, bones.”

and if you quake she will not care.

“Truth is truth”, she says. “It is what is.”

You will not be able to charm her. You will not be foolish enough to lie to her. As she mixes the tea, her frozen look will whisper to you without speaking,

“I have been hurt more than I could ever be. I have lost it all to the very last, my children, my pride, my plans and my hide. I am alone and no one can touch me now, because I want nothing. In wanting nothing, there are no ears for illusion’s siren songs. And having lost all of this, I have lost my own fear.

You will look back at her, and drown in your foibles. And she will watch you in your drowning.

If you survive yourself over tea, then she will dance for you, her wretched dance of pain and broken clattering. Will you withstand, as her body shakes in terrible jerks, a show, a vessel of power for a raging volcano? Her eyes host lightening bolts and her frame surges. With every gesture, she has become matter of fact, and in that rawness, her sex will have awakened without her knowing it – because it has become something else. Something not found in moving pictures and magazines. It has become something normal and personal. In her rawness, her scorched throat will have been quenched, and the air will feel authentic.

And after she has cooled, if you can sit with the rock in her heart and look back her gaze with love of your own, then you will be laughing at the night and she will laugh with you as the moon blisters bright and the owl howls at the river.


When Spring comes, the hag will go outside and fall into the earth as the Sun begins to warm her. She will lie there, rotting, waiting to die, wishing to die. She will even leave her body a ways but then she will be driven home, because in her belly will be new life and she will be drawn to it’s light. She will rock and hold herself. She will hide her baby as long as she can. But the Winter will be over and she’ll be drawn to rise, uncontrollably, to surrender herself once more to the labor of love, a love everlasting and relentless.

by Tasara

Winter Dreaming

– A Time of Dreaming –

dreaminthedark

We have crossed the threshold of Winter Solstice. But, darnit, it is still dark! We called in the light in holy ceremony, but where is the actual light?

The ‘pull’ towards the abyss has ceased. We have had our brush with the great shadow, sat through our lessons with Grandmother Darkness. Some of us have even plummeted into and crossed the Abyss. Those that have plummeted and not returned have passed on to other worlds, to be mourned by those left in this one. What do we do with all these leftovers from the Death feast of the season passed?

To understand this, we can look at the Wheel of the year in a few different ways. Firstly as this big wheel with huge powers on it’s opposite sides, of Sun and Moon, Light and Dark, Life and Oblivion. Creation. Disintegration. The closer we are on the wheel to one of those powers, the more we are under it’s influence. So, it being just post Winter Solstice, we are still heavily under the influence of the great shadow – but in a different way than before.

Different, because the great Wheel is moving. There is a movement. When we are before a pole like the sun or moon, we are being pulled towards it. Once we have crossed it’s center, we have been released. The great event is over and all the ‘making sense of things’, repositioning, realignment, refinding, digesting.. all that after-the-event stuff happens. We are now riding on momentum. The light may be dawning but it won’t be until Spring Equinox, one of the balance points between the poles, before the Sun is able to catch us up in his infectious spell and pull us towards his massive heart.

Back at the time of Samhain, when the great gates to the yawning Abyss opened, it was a time to release, as the great forces of the void pulled us, inescapably in. We went into stasis, the time between Death and Life. During that stasis, under the influence of the sacred darkness, some Thing built up and happened. Some alchemy occurred. An event, which peaked and then made room for a pin hole of light to return and begin to expand.

So now, after the Solstice, there is another release while the light enters. We, tired again from the drama of conception, rest in the unfathomable womb of the angelic mother as our guardian spirits move in to dream with us the dreams of our new incarnate existence. Therein is the gentle complexity of a life’s layers being grown. There is the simplicity of lying fallow under the inexorable, slow dawning of the nurturing sun.

We are preparing for the moment when we nail down our intentions with the naked force of our honest will – or more gently put, plant our seeds. This happens on Imbolc, Feb 1st.

But true intentions cannot come before the dreaming. We are still dreaming.

As we sleep, inspiration touches us, sending reverberations into the bones of who we are. There arises a yearning for what is next in the truth of what we are. More inspiration comes and this yearning, an open space, a ‘need fire’ as they say in the runic alphabet, combined with the love of the inspirational spirits, (this sublime safety we feel with them which gives birth to devotion) this, altogether forms a seed.

A most precious seed of life, dreamt in the most sacred way. For we do not create in this world as humans. We co-create.

Such is the sublime ecstasy of living.

by Tasara

Raven

She swims under the ocean, goes where I go.
Pulls canoe through the stars, to where I don’t know.
Her back, steaming mystery, hard-coded resolve.
Jeweled eyes marble black, into which I dissolve
Glints of forge-fire, emerald, yew
Pools in the darkness, deep chasm blue.

She’s lodged in my body, strong, loud and unshown
a monster of chaos, black feathers explode
ca cawing with laughter, “make sense, discard,
make sense, discard, discard, discard, discard”
old friend, my heart, my guide by my side
without whom my life would be calmer but blind.

by Tasara

The Well

I reached out
far
very far
and I fell.

I fell into myself
back
into
my deep, deep well
and was washed over with relief
to know that I cannot harm myself
with leaving

for I will always be there.
Like a child tottering along the edge of a rail and
the mother who won’t let her -.

Because it is back with myself where all things reside
where the moon is the richest
and I can safely lie on my back
in the summer dewy night
and look up
eyes awonder, up at the stars
private and safe
the sweetness of the night.

It is in the well
where the sacred resounds
with edges and echoes
that reach far beyond its thick moss.

It is here where the dreaming is strong
the mind is at peace
and the churning, more meaning

Chaos reaches high above the sky
order sifts between its heat waves
dust sinks and rises
patterns on the land

I come
and I go,
traveling far within the crevices
the ravaging land, untamed
yet holding wildness only in moments
when the wind turns to look at you
or me or them
and then the storm picks
one of us
and we fall back within
to realize that we
have never left

that the beauty in awe is remembering.

by Tasara