15.03.2020
Maybe you have been lucky until now. Your life has whirled along, a sea of experiences that never stopped you in your tracks. That bad break up? You drowned it and moved on. The career hurdle? You switched gears. Life as you knew it had bones you put your weight on and the day to day was regular. Its tone and timbre was reliable. Your place in it and part to play known and understood.
In our oh so modern societies, generations beyond a world ravaged by wars and wanton disregard for a bigger picture, we ignore the reaper always just out of sight. Only those who have been run over by death or disease understand its gifts. That it takes wandering exiled through those dark shadowlands to unwrap their precious bounty.
When this dark spectre fills your every horizon, you are banished beyond the grip you had on your life. The terrifying unknown gets its claws into you and begins feeding on your fear, a faceless horseman of your personal apocalypse. Its finality and non negotiable nature feels like a sentence, the gavel bought down on you and the curtain drawn across your old life.
It is what you do at this point that determines your journey. There isn't a life that skips this initiation, but there are many that subvert it. Refuse to accept reality and keep carrying on as though their attachment to how things were serves them. Cripple themselves with judgement, punish their tears for fears and ignore hope when it appears as a beggar in disguise. Look desperately for absent others, those supposed to look out or after us. This authority beyond our own whom we vote to govern our lives revealed to clutch only its best interests to its black heart.
What yet thrums within you is life. It runs your heart like a hammer, pumping blood into sinew and courage into corpuscles. Buried instincts break through the soil and you rise shaking to meet the reaper and stare down his long valleys. You befriend his corvids and learn the language of their croaking and cawing.
The quest begins. You leave your old self at the gate and step out of a polished shell. Your wildling takes over and your instinct kicks in. Strange creatures make nests in your hair. Death smiles his welcome.
Art by Gustave Doré (1832–1883)
Words c. Kerrie Basha 2020
This week I am offering panic button sessions - short and long - as we settle in for our underworld journey. Saddle up your horsemen and DM to book in for a chat, a cuppa and a caring nudge towards personal revolution.