We are now deep in the Autumnal season.

Look around you.

What do you observe?

The days become shorter, the sun withdraws its warmth, trees lose their leaves, the ground shifts beneath our feet, birds and all living things begin to retreat.

From the top of the cycle of light we are now descending into inevitable darkness.

It is a death of sorts.

It seems presently that we are surrounded everywhere by the threat of death.

It visits our eyes, ears, minds, words. We cover our faces so as not to breathe or consume a tiny particle of its perceived poison. We shield, protect, isolate, avoid, reject, resist.

On every side, the darkness presses in seemingly without reprieve.

Who amongst us truly wishes to consider or endure the reality of death?

Yet despite our resistance, it persists.

What is it you feel when you read these words?

What in the external world can you locate as an echo of sorts within yourself?

Where does the threat of death live inside of you, burrowing away?

Are you able to acknowledge its existence there?

Can you get close enough?

What does it feel like to touch?

Are you available to observe its darkness?

Again, I ask you - 'what is it you feel?'

Place your hand on your body, close your eyes and ask yourself.

Because to ask is to begin to know.

It is an acceptance that death exists; that we must start to release the life we cling to.

Somewhere along the line we have misunderstood that life and death are polar opposites; one to be favoured over the other.

Yet death holds much deeper truths and wisdom for each one of us.

"In what I could not see I saw everything I had ever feared."

- Hanya Yanagihara

In March this year the world shifted for all.⁠ I lost my job in London.⁠ An entire years worth of scheduled work evaporated.⁠ Overnight an identity I'd meticulously carved for 15 plus years crumbled; the construct disintegrated and slipped through my fingers.⁠ I did not know where it ended and I began.⁠

I lost relationships, hormonal regulation, stability, clarity.⁠
A dear friend of ours died suddenly. ⁠
As a collective we mourned and wailed our way through Saturday mornings.⁠
People wrote to me about the passing of their loved ones, their grief.

I felt it too. ⁠

I felt it as a pressing in of death on all sides and scrambled to cling to drifting fragments of an old self. ⁠

I wanted to live not die.

So I fought and pushed back, just like so many of us do.⁠

But to hold firm to the illusion that our identity is fixed and unchanging is a type of death also.
We cling to ideas of who we once were instead of who we each might become.
Yet to relinquish control also feels like free diving into death.
Either way is death, yet somehow we have learned to survive in a kind of half life; sleep walking aimlessly in a no mans land, barely breathing, barely existing.

Death brings new life.

But we must really die in order to embrace the gifts that nature's cycle offers.

Think of the seed that is planted into dark earth. Where does the seed come from?

Something has to die in order for it to live. A process must be completed.

Similarly, imagine if there was only ever daylight and the night never arrived.

What if the seasons failed to transition?

Imagine not ever experiencing fully the type of heartache that forces you to your knees.

What if we never truly experienced the joy of new love or life because we could not ever intimately embrace the crushing pain and sorrow of loss?

"We’re living in alchemical times – each one of us immersed in a crucible designed for the forging of souls. And in true alchemical fashion, by the application of heat, a strange kind of transformation occurs.
A purification.

If we can hold still there in the face of the fire, we become more essentially who we always meant to be.
The dross is burned away. It’s time now to let ourselves be forged, even if the flames sometimes hurt and the blaze feeds a longing for which there’s no cure."

- Sharon Blackie

It is as if life is now asking that we learn to be with 'the duende'.

The duende is a Spanish term, nuanced and challenging to translate into English precisely. We might perceive it as 'a heightened state of emotion' or 'an expression of authenticity'.

It is a force of energy which surges up from the soles of our feet.
An urge for us to make contact with the parts of ourselves which long; aches, dreams, yearnings.
It is a part of us that is dying.
A part of us that resists.
It is the fear that somehow it will consume us whole and not relinquish any part back to life.

The duende teaches us the depths we all, each one of us, carry. It teaches us to remember what we have so easily forgotten.

That no matter how dark, how raw, how seemingly inescapable and impossible to be at peace with, we must understand death as something which can connect us back to ourselves, to each other and our earth.

Over time we have disconnected from the world’s soul, from the wisdom of the land we live on, and the dreams of our ancestors. Our traditions have been lost in favour of intellect, science, reason and we feel it collectively as a trauma. It is. We are in some ways the walking dead. In the deepest parts of our psyche, we carry the injury.

We know that something is dying but we cannot find our way back to life.

We must urgently find our way back into this world.
Life is asking us to die - to who and what we have been.
So that we can come back to life.