Circles into Spirals : The High Art of Strong Endings

"So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their ending"

J. R. R. Tolkien

At the Autumn Equinox we move from a circle into a deepening spiral as the cycle comes to a close and we journey towards the Celtic new year at Samhain. 

It is this, the final festival of the Celtic Wheel of the Year, that invites us to honour closings and teaches us about the high art of strong endings.

I realised at Autumn Equinox six years ago that I had never really consciously completed anything. I was the Queen of moving ahead without ever exhaling fully. As a double Sagittarian, Firehorse born in the 1960s I took pride in my capacity to “keep her lit”, keep moving ahead, without ever pausing to complete. 

And I was rewarded for it. 

In the post industrial mind, that privileges productivity and progress, we are not encouraged to spend time on completions and endings.

Modernity is addicted to the rhythm of speed and the novelty of the next new shiny thing. 
We are rewarded for our impatience, for rushing ahead, 

into the next project,

the next chapter, 

the next task. 

All the attention and celebration is given to the start.

We rarely remain present to the endings that are in themselves unfoldments of new beginnings ……not full stops. 

In our urgency to nail the next thing, 

get on with it,

get over it, 

clear the decks,

rush to rebuild, 

to acquire, consume or experience the latest thing

we leave behind a valuable harvest that could sustain and inform the new. 

Strong endings require us to slow down. 

They require a presence and a willingness to feel the discomfort of the unknown,

to allow the mystery of the dark Goddess into disrupt our domesticated perfect modern lives.

 But we swim in a culture that consistently denies death and darkness.

And endings are death,

and death is dark.

It’s the end of the familiar, of certainty, of the known. 

If we move through life linearly

We perceive endings as final. 

In Celtic cosmology endings are death yes, but they are also beginnings.  The archaic animistic Celtic mind was rooted in the cycles of life, death and rebirth. All the faces of the Goddess were honoured.  

These days collectively we humans are facing a monumental ending - the ending of an old familiar world that is no longer working. It’s intense to be here, but I believe we were born for this time. 

I believe that the slow presence, that is now needed for a strong ending, is within you and I. It lies latent in our ancient bones, encoded in our ancestral DNA. 

But strong endings also require community to remember and reignite that presence.  

Dougald Hines in his book Our Work in the Ruins suggests how we attend to this ending is critical. He writes  

"The philosopher Federico Campagna speaks about living at the end of a world. In such a time, he suggests, the work is no longer to concern ourselves with making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, but to leave good ruins, clues and starting points for those who come after, that they may use in building a world that is presently unimaginable " 

In the next six weeks between Autumn Equinox and Samhain it is a wonderful time to contemplate on  our relationship to a world that is ending. 

🍂Can we keep our attention sharp as things dissolve?

🍂Can we be fully present with the intense discomfort of a world ending?

🍂Can we slow down enough to wisely hospice the dying familiar world so that a wiser more beautiful world will be born? 

You see, a strong ending sets the energies for the next circle, cycle or chapter and bring us into the deepening widening ascending spiral of our growth and evolution. 

In showing up fully present to the terror and pain of the endings happening around us, we will birth a new world that honours death, the dark feminine and living fully (w)holy alive

Those are  some of the ruins I want to leave for future descents. 

xM

🖤