This is a thing I forgot. In my search for the feel-good, I forgot this.

“If you have looked hard at the manner of things, if you have surveyed the troubles of our time, and cannot discover a way forward, do not despair. Do better. Grieve: mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you. In the stinging fumes that redden the eyes, you might partly recover a clear vision of where to go. You might come to see that forward movement is no longer possible in these moments, and that the way to go was never forward anyway – but awkward: into the blackness of catacombs, into the shadows of sanctuary, into the riven cracks signed with the pen of the trickster, into the heat of compost, into the position of a prostrated man who knows that when the storm roars the thing to do is to be still. In that stillness, entire worlds churn.” ~ Bayo Akomolafe

“Mount an altar to the sensuous feelings of loss that swim through you.”

There is something about this that feels the same as being deeply immersed in BDSM. Embracing the shadow side, dancing with the darkness that lives within each of us. There is something here that I used to find in kink, or maybe just something that I thought I would find.

I guess I will have to embrace it in the ‘nilla world – with a sigh. This is where trauma work lives, when I did healing work with people who had experienced complex trauma, this is where we went. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that work.

I need to reconnect with that – not necessarily with that exact work but with the gifts that come with it. Like anyone who visits the underworld, we go on a quest for something that we can only find there.

Hecate, who I’ve talked about before. Goddess of the crossroads, goddess of the journey. She’s often portrayed with three aspects, because she encompasses maiden, mother, and crone. She knows the way past Cerbes, the three headed dog that guards the entrance to the underworld, and she helped search for Persephone when she was abducted by the god of the underworld, Hades.

I have lost my Hecate self. Again. But not forever…