Often, our paths of transformation and healing are dominated by solar metaphors and images - those of growth, moving upward, rising above, and transcending the messier, more chaotic, more unknowable dimensions of our human experience.
But an alchemical perspective, while not denying that organic movement of the spirit, includes and at times privileges the lunar current - the descending, earthy, soulful return to the mud and the ground.
The alchemical imagination honors this movement out of the clouds and the high mountaintops of crystal clarity, and downward into the valleys, gardens, and richness of the rotting logs and green moss.
It’s not as clear or known here, but is vital and pregnant with color, fragrance, and essence. It’s rich and multi-layered and contradictory. And utterly unresolvable.
If what we’re interested in is the felt experience of wholeness, where we’re able to touch and breathe and move within the entirety of what it means to be an open, sensitive, embodied human being, it’s essential to include both solar and lunar dimensions of the spectrum of consciousness in our practices and in our lives.
That wholeness includes not only a solar, heroic movement upward into spirit, ascending and transcending, but also a lunar, endarkened, rich, subtle, nuanced movement downward into soul, into dream, fantasy, imagination, and creativity… into the soil and mud and the womb of the earth.
