Recently, I stood on the dike along the Connecticut River watching the ice floes come down from the North. First, there were just the sludgy, half-submerged chunks with their edges clicking together in surface water. Then whole islands of white snow took their place and set a new pace floating toward the sea. Finally and faster now continent after continent coming round river’s bend with a deep slicing of water sounding a quiet roaring. The sun had done its work on the mountains and the ice pack; winter lost it hold. The sun set salmon with the ice flowing toward its streaks and a nearly full moon rose opposite in a still light blue sky.
I felt the seasonal shift in my cells and pondered its power. An image rose in my mind’s eye of the Greek Goddess Persephone climbing out of the Underworld to take her place on one of the ice floes and lead the parade toward spring time.
I let the image expand and imagined what it was like to climb out of the Underworld, not that first time when she was still young and a first reunion with her mother waited, but in this year, after millennia of climbing. A poem is growing from the experience with lines like: “She arrives fresh from Death and the years of It layered on her. No longer young. Not now beautiful.”
The image for this Persephone who makes the hard climb year after year is from Mellissae Lucia’s Oracle of Initiation’s card of Knowing. Here she is caked still in Underworld dark with just a hint of something fresh underneath. This image acknowledges the hard and dirty work that Persephone – and each one of us – undertakes to climb.
Tonight is the dark moon time when you are invited to sit with your own dark and decide what to release. Know that this is the soil in which the seed will root in, reaching down and grounding itself before rising up. At the time of the Equinox we in the Northern Hemisphere will then begin to rise.
This moonth’s reading is meant to help you in your personal climb out of the Underworld by letting go of what you do not need to carry, centering yourself at the threshold of change, and giving you a vision of what can emerge when you adjust to see in spring light.
LEAVE BEHIND: What would be beneficial to leave behind in winter’s dark mystery?
BALANCE: How to find my right balance at the threshold?
EMERGE INTO: What can emerge for me as I step into the spring’s new light?
You can order this as an e-reading for $22. Here is a sample of how I do these readings in a collaborative intuitive format.
If you now want to know more about Persephone, you should check out Joanna Powell Colbert’s 30 Days of Persephone. I am really looking forward to this.