Death
Women are well traversed in death. We travel through many death phases throughout our lifetime: each month during menstruation, the moment before birthing a child, when we encounter menopause, the loss of a loved one, whilst letting go of a relationship. Each time we orgasm we experience what the French so beautifully call “la petite mort,” meaning “a brief loss of consciousness,” but more commonly described as “a little death.”
Our incredible female bodies mirror the moon cycle with her dark phase reassuring us that darkness and death are necessary prerequisites for the following rebirth and renewal. The Earth, too, also teaches us the same through the movement of the seasons, the solstices, the dusk and the dawn, and the ebb and flow of the tides.
Death isn’t to be feared. It’s a natural part of our life-cycle and is a necessary phase. For it is in the darkness that we start the all-important transition into a new way of being: a new chapter in our lives, a new understanding of ourselves, new experiences, and new cycles of being.
Death is where ideas germinate. It’s where all the seeds slowly root their way deep down into the fecund blackness before rising upwards towards their purpose. It is a gestational phase where our fertile essence seeks to create and bring forth out from the darkness into the light. This is by no means limited to physical birth, but also creative pursuits, the changes we make to our lives, how we embody our healing and how we choose to show up in the world.
The transitional stage of the chrysalis as the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly is a wonderful metaphor for this transformation. It’s not easy. There is dissolution, there is pain, there is frustration at the unknown, there is a fight to break free and, for us humans, there is fear. But then the first light appears on the horizon and we realise that the death phase was simply an initiation, a time of profound personal power and growth. One that can only be encountered in the depths of that subterranean world. One that begins to make so much sense when viewed in the light of day.
One thing we know for sure whilst having this human experience, is that darkness always precedes the light. Without death, there is no rebirth. And that should be honoured for all the mystery and wonder that it contains. Death is a rite of passage that we must go undergo time, and time again, as we continually shed the layers of our being. Just like the snake, a symbol long associated with the Feminine, sheds its skin.
To encounter death, is to come face to face with the truth of who we are. To run away or to avoid what we intuitively know to be true, is to do ourselves the greatest disservice. Leaning in is the only way for those who wish to live a fully embodied and empowered life. To walk the path of death, to befriend it and collaborate with it, is essential for us as women for we are natural death walkers, as our bodies so magnificently demonstrate.
“Transformation can only occur in the dark.” ~ Demetra George