A journey into the underworld...
An invitation to not look away.
I woke up one morning with the line: a wrinkle in time, a wrinkle in time, a wrinkle in time… repeating itself over and over again in my head.
Strange, I thought. But knowing my dreams are never random I made a note to look up a wrinkle in time and see if there were any clues. Later that day I searched Google and saw it was some big Hollywood movie with Oprah etc… hmmm not that keen I thought but I did make a mental note - must read the original book or watch this movie.
[Important side note here, I pay attention to every message, sign, dream, animal, “coincidence,” because when you call yourself a witch, the very first rule of magic is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.]
Jump ahead a few months and I finally get around to watching the film… Slowly, slowly I start to get it… Start to realise that my guides or angels or whatever lies out beyond what we deem ‘real life’ are trying to tell me something… to almost warn and remind me that we exist in multiple timelines and dimensions of reality.
And that “fear” is our biggest limitation.
“Fear is one of the biggest things that keeps us locked into unlimited limitedness…”
In the film, the “baddies” or IT, represent our obsession with societal conformity and our fear of emotions and difference… I finished the film thinking a lot about my own wrinkle in time - or rather, my own escape from ‘reality’ and search for what could be deemed different or “dangerous” territory.
I spent a lot of my teens and twenties pushing the boundaries of safety. Growing up I experienced many unsafe things in what were perceived to be ‘safe’ environments. It was in the ‘safety’ of my own home with security gates and alarms that I was first held up at gunpoint. It was in the ‘safe’ car of my favourite teacher that I had my first car accident. It was in the comfort of my own familiar bed that I was violated.
When safety betrays you time and time again there is a natural inclination to seek out something else, to seek out danger.
When I left home at 17 I had already mastered the art of sneaking out to clubs and bars, a thrill I had come to enjoy, a taste of rebellion that only came alive after dark.
I had many nights of madness.
The worst had already happened so there was nothing left to be afraid of, right?
Those periods of playing with fire and dancing with my shadows were my training ground. I worked in nightclubs throughout my university degree and allowed those nights that never ended to become a place of solace. Afterparty after afterparty, the dungeons where I got to meet the ugliest and most beautiful parts of myself and others.
My mythic journey into the underworld.
A journey of many deaths and many torturous truths. Through stripping myself of perceived safety, I had come to learn the greatest gift. A gift of unwavering strength within myself.
A safety that could only ever exist within.
It was in those grimy spaces of dark spirits and white powdered ghosts that I came to find gold. Came to find a quiet power. A true power. A power that picked me up off the ground. A power that helped me claw my way out of the underworld and back to the land of the living…
A power to choose life.
A power to live.
Like, really live.
Safety is an illusion because no matter how fancy your security is, you could get robbed. No matter how charming the person, they could be your captor. And no matter how safe you play it, you will die.
Yes,
Die.
We all die.
(Well, this iteration of our lives at least)
And what I have come to realise is that because of our fear of dying (or belief in it being the end), we have stopped truly living.
In A Wrinkle in Time, there is an important distinction between chronos time and kairos time.
Chronos time is how we live day to day, it is man-made time, quantitive, measured, linear…whilst kairos time is what I like to call Spirit time, spiral time, or even African time (for those wise ones on this continent who refuse to conform to the hustle).
Chronos time works in our society because it gives us control (or at least an illusion thereof). We can measure our months, and days, and hours. We can deduct meaning from our measuring. The downfall of this type of time is that it is linear. Limited. It has an endpoint. And by our little minds, that endpoint is death.
Kairos time is different, it spirals, it is infinite, and has no end. It is life after life. Not life after death. It knows there is no death, only rebirth. When my journey with external dangers such as clubs, drugs, and rock n rollers’ was satiated I started seeking a new thrill. A terrifying yearning to look within.
The awakening of my inner witch:
A medicine woman who dares to look within herself.
It was during this period of my life that I found myself searching for teachers. Searching for a timeless wisdom. I wanted to find indigenous tribes who had not been totally civilised by chronos time. I yearned to know of an existence that was uncorrupted by the fear of death and the rush of material success. I wanted to meet those who had some slither of mystery left. Who believed in magic, and the soul, and the Goddess of nature.
And find them I did.
My search took me to many random and faraway places. I built teepees in North Dakota and learned that the indigenous people of Turtle Island (North & Central America) could speak to animals and alter the weather. I was humbled and heartbroken. It was during this time that I realised just how far from nature (and my own human nature) I really was.
My longing continued and took me to Mexico, the Amazon, California, Ibiza, and even New York. It was actually in the big cities that I met my greatest teachers. An old Australian woman in a coffee shop in London, and the scariest crone in Upstate New York. It was during this time that I began the slow (and painful) return to my body. To actually living in my body. I ate weeds and milked goats and slowly, slowly my bleed returned after 2. 5 years of not menstruating. It was the greatest gift and the inspiration that released me from the stranglehold of chronos time.
{AKA the rush to a finish line set out for me by a society I did not agree with (or fully understand)}
I quit the law conversion.
I left London and the expectations of my parents and inner perfectionist behind.
I released control over what I ate, what I believed, and who I thought I was and should be.
I learned to live cyclically and embody my inner seasons. Every month I bled with the full moon and prayed to the waters. I died every winter and was reborn by spring. I let go of career prospects. Broke off engagements. Left homes I had built and dreams I had envisioned.
I let myself die again, and again, and again.
Death teaches us how infinite we are.
Not how limited.
Therapists may call it a coping mechanism, but when my stepdad died a few months ago my only solace was in kairos time. In the knowing that he was not really gone. That the story did not end here.
His death was sudden and shattering. It brought me to my knees and tested all that I had ever believed. It demanded that I trust. That I dig really deep because there was too much left unsaid. Too many hearts broken, questions unanswered, apologies unacknowledged…
I realised that everything I had been learning was now being brought forward for me to embody, to move from a belief into a knowing.
I cry as I write this because the grief is so close to the surface. The shock put a massive pause on everything. It hangs on my family’s shoulders. It remains in our hearts and guts like the indigestible weight of a million missed moments in time. A karmic contract closed without any closure.
I see now how A Wrinkle in Time came to me to remind me that time is far more complex and curious than we can ever begin to understand. It allowed me to trust in the messages that came to me. The knowing that the song on the radio was him, that the message through an old friend was him, that these signs that I have always looked out for are real and worth paying attention to.
The beauty of kairos time is not that we get to just give up on time or refute it all together but to realise just how poignant certain moments in time actually are. A lot of the movie revolves around this idea of the “ripeness of time” or the “propitious moment.” We all know that sudden urge that says, now is the time.
Leave
Go back
Forgive
Let go
What I learned these last months is that when the urge comes to act, we have to be brave and act. And when the urge comes to be, we have to let it all go and be.
My life feels like it has been turned inside out. I am being asked to drop the timeline and meet my emotions fully. The denial. The guilt. The rage. And the grief. Let go of the urgency of the things I thought I needed to do and meet the agony of what could now never be done. This moment demanded that I do not avoid the void, the hollow dark place where these big feelings reside.
The mythic underworld where most choose not to go.
We derive comfort from chronos time, you see. Safety in the monotony of the daily routine, the busi-ness that keeps us distracted. We like order because emotions are chaotic. They don’t play by the rules and sometimes they swallow us whole; turn our material matters to mush. The idea of an infinite spiraling existence is enough to leave anyone with cosmic anxiety and so we turn to something tangible.
We look at our phones and scroll. We turn to tech to disassociate. We drown our empathy in intellectual stimulation. In an artificial intelligence that has nothing to do with the reality of the body, the heart…the soul.
Right now there is a mass genocide taking place.
A recent statistic confirmed that there are over a million Palestinians displaced and thousands killed from both sides. The horror is almost too much to fathom. There is also a hunger within the masses to take sides. To make judgments on what should or should not be done. The intense polarising of people exposes the wound. A collective wound that seeks to other. That wants to win or be on the “right” side. The truth is there is no “side” when it comes to war. And there is certainly no righteousness. War is without morality. War is war and war is wasted life. A cold death without dignity.
A death on the part of our nature.
Our human nature.
Yes, war is unnatural.
It is not found in nature.
I went searching in Margaret Mead’s work (which I will share more about another time) but the conclusion remains ~ war is an invention. Like chronos time, it is an invention of man. A fearful man who has forgotten his place in the planetary play. Man who has separated himself from his source connection and thus believes in an illusion of scarcity.
A fear of the other.
A fear of himself.
My stepfather was conscripted at a young age. A young man trained to interrogate. A boy, really. A boy conditioned to turn off his heart and deny his humanity. To inflict harm on a fellow human, one must dehumanise the other.
Dehumanise oneself.
This is the legacy of war.
This is the suffering that lives on in the souls of our ancestors.
In our blood and bones.
And so right now it feels like we are in a *kairotic moment. A moment in time where the world is watching. Where the world is waking up to the same story of distortion and deception. An old story of corruption and greed that has caused, and continues to cause, an unspeakable amount of trauma.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech he concluded it with, “It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment.” It feels as though that urgency has returned.
But this time it feels like an inner urgency.
An urgency to find the places inside of ourselves that are still at war. The places in our relationships that don’t know peace. It is no longer enough to point a *finger. Death holds a power that humbles and equalizes. A power that brings everyone to their knees. A realisation that there is so little that we truly know and so little that we can ever really control. It is in times like these that we are called to embody the ‘spiritual’ teachings we have been consuming.
The messages we know of mind but not yet of body.
“It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and spiritual maturity to witness in full force the collective shadow of humanity and keep your heart open.” - Sarah Jones
Without an interrogation of our own shadow, we will not be equipped to bear witness to the collective shadows that are playing out before us. If ever there was a time to seek the parts of you that you have shut out or gone to war with, now is the time.
My prayer is that we are brave in our seeking and that we may come to know the most beautiful and most ugly parts of ourselves - and love them all the same.
A mythic journey into the underworld to retrieve what we deem unworthy or unloveable.
The dark, light, grey and gold.
I am with you on that journey.
X
*Finger: when we point one finger, three point back at us.
*Kairotic: a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action: the opportune and decisive moment.
