October 13 dawn, Fall is still falling, and notably I feel an internal shift unfolding.
From planting, working outdoors, harvesting, to indoor, laboratory work, insight and intuition, subtle processes and study.
Perfume is on my mind again. All the raw materials I collected, purchased, researched during the year are now ready to use. Tinctures of Ambergris, honey bee hive, angora musk, Beaver Castoreum. Extracts of Muskrat musks all bottled and on the shelf ready to dance together, marry in polyamourus combinations choreographed by intuition, memories current and Karmic, vision and inspiration. When I think of it it seems daunting!! But I trust the natural process that I can already feel creeping into my perception.
Time for the Alchemical processes to rise and be followed, reveal themselves.
Alchemy. Many say the root of the word is from Arabic, “Al Chem”, The black earth. But lately I have wondered if it is not rather “From the black, or dark of the year”
For these mysteries, we as a civilization have explored, and recorded in our collective subconscious, seem to call in the dark of the year while we huddle around our fires and furnaces,while the daylight diminishes and the nights get longer. When we naturally withdraw.
Much as the dark of the moon, the new moon, seems to bring the darker feelings and fears we would rather not wear on our sleeves to prominence, so does this yearly decline into darkness bring us closer to the deeper mysteries and memories that are antithetical to our busy bright 9 to 5 extroverted bustling, building and restructuring of reality to our wills.
Stillness, reflected in that muted quiet a blanket of snow forces upon us. Leaves and signs of life stripped from trees, rotting on the ground to decompose, nourish and sustain next springs leap to life. The minor cycle, decay and death that winter brings, a reflection and microcosm of larger and longer cycles of birth, life and death in which we do our best in the short time allotted us and make our unique mark, our one chicken scratch among billions.
A little morbid? But each part of a cycle different from the others. If it were not so there would be no cycles, no change, no growth, nor even birth or death. Without hills there could be no valleys. And this is the nature of Nature.
This is what we have been given to work with. As above, so below some philosophers have said.
Perhaps there is a part of us that is not from here, timeless, unaffected by birth, death or any other boundaries and laws of this world, but in the tangible reality we do exist in and perceive, we are just as much a part of this world, just as affected as any other physical being in this world.
So,,, Alchemy,, for me it is a rising within of the subtle light when the brightness and warmth outside have receded. Perhaps it is simply more visible when the brightness of the external Sun has diminished. Like the Hermit card in Tarot holding his lantern on the mountaintop and illuminating the path for those who would ascend.
Transformation, transmutation, sublimation and the other “ations” that draw us higher up the intangible mountain within us.
If reality is perception as some folk claim, then the dark of the year is a great time to explore perception, climb the heights for a better and more complete view of the terrain below where we plod along worrying about what lies beyond each turn in our path.