Dreaming in the Long Dark
Wisdom from Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining) and Francis Weller, for this long dark night of the soul we are entering now
On the Winter Solstice, I was privileged to attend an online presentation, “Ancient Rhythms: Dreaming into Death and Renewal,” by Francis Weller and Pat McCabe (Woman Stands Shining), hosted by SANDS, the Institute for Science and Non-Duality. What was shared was so beautiful and powerful that I am moved to type up my notes here and send those ripples out further to my Writing to Right the World friends.
Francis Weller is a psychotherapist in the tradition of James Hillman, practicing what he calls “soul-centered therapy,” and specializing in grief; he’s best known for his small but mighty book The Wild Edge of Sorrow.
Pat McCabe is a Dine elder who is also initiated into the Lakota tribe, and she is a sacred vessel for the wisdom of her lineages, which she generously and eloquently shares in many contexts around the world.
Pat began with an invocation in story and song that calmed down the some 800 people in the audience, and brought our ancestors into the space with us.
This turn to the ancestors came up as well in my Writing to Right the World conversations last week with Maria Sirois, Nina Simons, Manda Scott, Cynthia Jurs and Osprey Orielle Lake.
It seems many of us are being called to remember that we are here on this “wild and sorrowful edge” of time because our ancestors were tough survivors who cast their seeds into the uncertain futures of their own time and place. Now it is our turn, and they are in us, in body and spirit, calling on us to stand strong; to do our best to be strong links in the unbroken chain into the future of life on Earth.
Pat also reminded us that we are linked with All That Is through the elements, particularly through Water and Air. It is a destructive illusion to think of ourselves as separate individuals—separate from each other and from Mother Earth. In a time when so many of us feel lonely, feeling into our deep relationship with All That Is can be a source of strength and fellowship.
Friendship and community is a form of “soul medicine,” Francis added, that can help us not only as individuals, but also in “repairing our relationship to the world.”
Conventional western therapy is based on the model of two people alone in a room, but “We need a much larger healing vessel,” Francis said, and we can create that by coming together intentionally in circle.
Francis invoked Kathleen Dean Moore’s term “refusia,” meaning “small places where life endures”; similar, I think, to Meg Wheatley’s “islands of sanity” that she encourages people to create to weather the gathering storms.
If you can’t find such a place, you have to create it yourself, Francis said. “You have to become the center of the house of belonging.” I am certainly aware of many such groups that are gathering now, as we prepare for the polycrises brewing for 2025.
I was glad to hear Francis point to imagination as a key form of “soul medicine” for what he calls the “Long Dark” of the era we are entering now. There was a subtle shift in how he described the work of imagination, which aligns so much with how I feel imagination at work in me.
“I am not imagined, I am imagined,” he said. “I don’t dream, I am dreamed. The Earth is a dreaming being, offering inspiration, imagination, dreams, rituals, songs—our job is to become receptive, to allow our imagination to become activated and alive. Jung considered image- making to be the primary activity of psyche or soul. It’s our job to get quiet long enough to hear the dream of the Earth returning.”
I feel like this kind of deep, quiet, soulful, Gaian imagination has been coming through me for nearly a year now, in the form of the intuitive drawings that I have been called to create, often on a nightly basis.
As Francis Weller said, it’s not our job to “figure out” what is being imagined or dreamed through us. It’s just our job to be a holy vessel for that potent stream of soul force.
Pat McCabe suggested that we are in a “pause of not-knowing,” in which “we lack the materials to come up with a new story.” Instead, “we can use our 20-20 hindsight” and turn back to the old stories that have sustained human beings throughout the ages.
Of course, it’s important to be discerning with the stories we reanimate. I have no use for the patriarchal, hierarchical stories of separation that have dominated the human imagination over the past 2000 years. But beneath that top layer of story are the deeper imaginal realms of the soul, and this is where we need to turn our attention now, to those glittering crystal resources deep within the timeless space of the psyche.
Francis talked about the “two primary sins of western culture: amnesia and anesthesia.” We forget, and we slumber, and meanwhile the world is suffering and disintegrating all around us. “We’re being asked in the Long Dark to wake up and remember” that we have the medicine needed to heal ourselves and our world, Francis said, reminding us that the brilliant soul-centric psychologist James Hillman taught that soul is most noticeable in places of affliction, grief, suffering, and tenderness.
“The medicine you bring lies right next to your wound,” he said. “In your wound is your genius. We are compelled to return to the territory of the wound again and again because that’s also where we find soul. The wounds we carry inform us about how we to bring our souls out in the world.”
So in this dark season of the Winter Solstice, and in this Long Dark era that is upon humanity now, we need to “hold vigil in the darkness and see what comes,” Francis said. The best medicine now is "rest and patience," remembering that “I am as much world as self, as much communal as personal. This is how we come back into the dance of soul.”
Pat suggested that we imagine a cleared space for an altar to the future. “What does it feel like to have the altar open, empty, full of pure potential?” she asked. “What are the things that I know will be on the next altar, what seeds do I want to plant going forward?”
Francis too spoke of seeds that we need to cultivate today as we dream and are dreamed into the future.
“Most of us will not see the end of the Long Dark,” he said. “We can plant seeds and water them with our tears and affection. So much depends on us right now—what we bring, what we do, how we live, how we love. It’s important to remember that we are not bereft, empty-handed, or powerless. We have the medicine we need to make it through these decades.”
“We are being led through a rough initiation,” Pat McCabe concluded. “It’s an invitation to deep ripening, to a form of fearless generosity. We must wake up, and we’re going to wake up in the dark. How can we lean into feeling our love for this world?”
For herself, Pat said, “I intend to uphold the honor of being a human being.”
What a noble intention to put out into the world as the year 2025 rushes towards us!
Yours in the dreaming darkness,
Jennifer
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My heart’s open wider now. Thanks.
I’ve email forwarded the link to the pre-Solstice Tuesday group.
Also to Padraig O’Tuama here on Substack. In case a connection between you hadn’t happened yet and might be fertile. Or, just because you both sing different versions if the same human round.
Happy Hanukkah and a warm Yule to you.