Rain, Endless Rain

Office decor that turned out surprisingly
relevant for this post

It's October 1st, which means I skipped my morning workout in favor of decorating my office with Halloween decor. I'm still climbing tonight -- something I was actually hoping to weasel out of because I'm not feeling it today, but my climbing buddies are (thankfully) having none of it.

This weather is sapping the motivation from me; it's been raining for over a week and my once-bright spirits that delighted in the end to the drought-like conditions are now soggy. I want to eat cheese-smothered foods and hide under the blankets until the sun returns. I'm trying to see this as a dry run for the awful soul-sucking sadness that is winter seasonal affective disorder, but all the carefully laid plans I've made on combating the cold grayness aren't holding up under this rain. Methinks I need to revise my approach.

I need to get a fine point sharpie 

I did do some minor crafting today, though. Behold my tiny putka pod jack-o-lanterns! I set up a little station at work for people to make their own since I was having trouble mustering the energy to make a bunch, but people have been enjoying them.

I'm not really feeling the writing flow today, but thinking about how I feel in winter has me considering something else I read in Spiral Dance about the darker sides of ourselves. Starhawk calls it "Starlight vision" -- but I've seen it referenced in Jungian psychology and a bunch of pagan vloggers as the shadow self, or shadow aspect of who we are. In psychology, it's usually the subconscious parts of our personality, while in pagan discussions, it usually refers to the darker parts of ourselves that isn't all love and light. It's the counterweight of death to life, of sadness to joy, of yin to yang. If we don't explore the parts of ourselves that exist in the dark, we can hardly claim to know ourselves at all. As Starhawk states:

“But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one’s own self. Starlight vision, the “other way of knowing,” is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman’s Mysteries, “These subjective factors … are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated.” 

I'm taking this grey, sodden time to look inward at my shadow side and see what she has to teach me. I've done meditations on this in the past, but it's easy to forget to keep up regular internal conversation.