december dark moon rituals newsletter
Black Moon missives from the Void
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
To Know The Dark, Wendell Berry
Greetings, beloveds, on this Black Moon, during this seasonal time of pregnant quiet.
When a month has two dark/new moons, we call the second moon the Black Moon. So here we are, on this blackest of moons, the last dark moon of 2024, perched on the precipice of a new year and also deeply wrapped in the dark embrace of winter’s depths. The winter solstice, the longest night of the year, occurred a week ago in the northern hemisphere, and the land is calling our bodies & souls into a time of deep rest and hibernation. Unfortunately, many of us are not able to slow down, and in fact the holiday season this time of year can make our lives even more stressful and hectic than usual. My body cries out in resistance against this, yearning for a nestling into the dark embrace of this season: a stilling of restless limbs, head rested on a soft pillow, with slow, measured breaths filling my lungs and exhaling with deep sighs.
My body has been speaking to me quite a bit this year, loud messages of resistance to the depleting lifestyle I have adopted under capitalism’s grinding pressure. I have been struggling with a rare autoimmune disorder diagnosis, dealing with ongoing symptoms of burnout, and been sick with various infections more times than I can count due to my immune condition. It has been painful, discouraging, and mystifying, as I try to navigate the small changes I can make to better tend to myself, when what is really needed is a wholesale overhaul of my lifestyle. It’s probably what most of us need; and my body, with all its needs & pains, is refusing to be ignored - as I did for most of my life. But the task of change feels so daunting, and my body is so tired.
So in this season of dark, I long to crawl into that Darkness and rest; to “make love to the Darkness”, to quote my dear friend Hannah Hadadi; and to feed my griefs and pains to the Darkness.
For many of us, this time of rest is also a time of deep reflection, that calls us to look back over the year and be present with all that it held - the joys, gratitudes, and accomplishments we are proud of, the moments within which we felt the most alive, the memories that took our breaths away. And also to be present with all of the griefs of the year: the people & beings lost, the failures, the dreams dashed, the collective injustices, the moments of pain & heartbreak. These all weigh heavily on me in this time of Dark, and I think it is necessary in these moments to hold both - the gratitudes and griefs - and spend some time with them in the Darkness. And once we have cradled them long enough, to feed the Darkness our grief and our heavy emotions - the Darkness is strong enough to carry it all, and delights when we release our pain to be composted.
I feel myself deep in the belly of the Void this time of year, as the darkness of winter holds sway over the land and the wild winds whistle in my fireplace. I do not want to move too quickly into the new beginning of January, for winter is still with us for several more months; we are meant to move slowly, with our ears to the ground, listening for the wisdom of the Void. Now is the time when the Old is flung into the gaping maw of the black abyss, to be churned and alchemized and regenerated as a Seed of the New. The Void is a place of both creation and destruction, where formless matter floats in endless space and from which all the energy that enlivens the universe is birthed. The Void is the place of incubation, the deep dark slumber of the womb, preparing to give birth.
The Void is both terrifying and enlivening. What a paradox, this place where all things end and all things begin. I have a particular affinity for this place, and for the time of the Dark Moon, where in ongoing cycles we see how things die only to begin anew at the exact same moment. Endings are beginnings, and the chrysalis time in the Void is absolutely necessary for rebirth into something new and alive.
And even though I have a deep affinity for the Void medicine of the Dark Moon, I also struggle mightily with it. In my chronic illness journey, and in many parts of my life right now, I feel lost. Adrift. Floating in the void, unsure of the way forward. Holding my hand up to face but unable to even recognize my own fingers in the inky blackness.
Perhaps it is time to rest in the void. To simply submit, surrender, to allow the alchemical transformative power of the void to eat our griefs and fears and confusion and anger. To come face to face with the Void, to tremble, if we must, in the face of its power, and to trust that this place of falling apart is also the place of being put back together, fashioned anew.
In my work with grief tending and ancestral connection, I have come across another aspect of the Void that is seething beneath the surface of many of our lives. Many of us carry a deep sense of grief around our loss of communal rites and rituals, catalyzed by a long history of violence and oppression, stretching back centuries, that has created a cultural vacuum, which is often acutely felt in white people & those with European ancestry. Camille Sapara Barton in their book Tending Grief elucidates this feeling evocatively: “the violence of the Void - the sense of internal emptiness that many white people feel; a sense that they have no culture, no richness, no ancestral wisdom to connect with or lean upon. It is this sense of emptiness that I believe is the driving force for cultural appropriation and other intersecting harms rooted in extraction and domination.”
Sometimes, when we look within ourselves, we see a deep chasm, a void, where we instinctively feel that ancestral relationship and belonging to the land should live instead. Violence created this void, violence of severance from our selves, our bodies, our Beloved Dead, our ecologies. And over time, the severance widened into a chasm inside. This feeling of touching into the void is terrifying, mind-warping; refusing to address this void has led to much colonial and neo-colonial harm, as Barton writes. We yearn for ancestral connection, for a feeling that we belong to our people, but we often we repress this yearning, disconnecting ourselves from the emptiness inside and turning our backs on the void, ignoring its pain only to enact that pain on the world around us.
If we want to tend to these wounds, to reestablish connections, we must begin, as Barton says, by “submerg[ing] yourself in this feeling of Void”. The paradox of ancestral connection work, and of connecting to this seasonal winter time, is that in order to reach the new seeds of regeneration in spring, we must allow ourselves to be changed and composted by the wisdom of winter, of the darkness. The beautiful thing about the Void is that new life is fashioned there - and those of us who are courageously grieving, tending the wounds, and making tentative steps back toward ancestral practices, are a part of the new life that is being birthed from the Void. No, we can never go back to pre-colonial times - before the witch burnings and the violent spread of Empire and the devastation of the Earth - but we can trust the Void, and the wisdom of our grief, to fashion newly regenerated rituals & rites whose seeds live in the marrow of our bones. We are singing over the bones, breathing new vital marrow into their long-dormant hollows.
But we will not have the strength, nor the inspiration, to create the revitalized rituals of relationship that we desperately need in the coming year if we do not allow ourselves time to weep in the Void, to rest in the warm embrace of the Void.
So now, let us rest. Even if a few hours is all we can manage. Trust the Void.
“If we are courageous enough to face the wounds of empire, we can begin to address the Void and come back into connection - with ourselves, our ancestors, and life itself. We can remember, on a body level, that we are held by this land and deeply entangled with it. To support life, we must find a way to be in right relationship with each other.”
Camille Sapara Barton
Ritual:
Write two lists from the past year:
all of the year’s gratitudes, encapsulating all the moments you felt alive and everything from the year that makes you feel proud
all the year’s griefs, pain, losses, failures, disappointments
Practice holding space for both. Breath in the silence.
Give prayers of thanks to the Darkness for your joys, feel the strength of your accomplishments in your body.
Give your griefs & pains to the Void, to the Darkness, with whispers into the night or burned on scraps of paper. The Void lovingly accepts what we want to leave behind, composting it into beauty. Ask the Void to alchemize your wounds into new medicine for the coming year.
Read through this brilliant thread on revolutionary, anti-capitalist, ancestral rest by Patricia the Radical Somatic Therapist:
And then, REST. As deeply as you can, as much as you can, with no need to rush into the new year. The seed is germinating. Give it time in the Void.
🖤🖤🖤🖤