Arrival of Darkness & The Hibernating Bear
Oregon coast.
October started off ridiculously glorious, almost alarmingly glorious, here in my city. Bright warm days, golden sun, sun glasses, crop tops and shorts still an option. Warm weekends spent in debaucherous revelry were snatched away from me too quickly. But, all good and beautiful things do inevitably come to an end.
The rains came alright though, they came just fine. When the rains don't come, or they're late it worries me. Mt. Hood sat all greyish for weeks... and then boom! The next day he was covered in a white blanket. It poured heavy those last few weeks of October and through this early November. A second spring as I like to call it. Everything becomes green again after the dryness of summer, moisture loving plants come back to life...
And then darkness descends. 4pm sunsets, living in a perpetual state of gloaming and artificial light when it's too dark too see in your home. I am exalted in the sun, it gives me a joy I can't describe. But, it's an odd comfort this season and despite my moaning and groaning, I take full advantage of what it has to offer: incubation, hibernation, introspection.
Wildwood and bone reading.
The Bear has been a figure in my dreams, in my divination, in the ashes of burned candles and wax. The mother with her offspring lurks in the forests of my dreamscapes... I stopped for a moment in a book store not too long ago, to take a peek into Ted Andrews book Animal Speak. He wrote of how the female bear goes to her den for the winter, the seed that she carries is nurtured in the darkness and in the spring, she emerges proudly with what she cultivated in incubation. This is what Bear is encouraging me to do, I believe. I listen.
My den is outfitted, my work has presented itself to me and I shall begin. Through dreams, through trance and speaking with spirit. The work never ends and it is always beginning.