JW: The Long Dark by Francis Weller

I think we might like the Francis Weller thing … he just talked about this Inuit word: Qarrtsiluni … ‘Sitting together in the dark, waiting for something unexpected to happen.’ “We are not going to figure our way out of this.” Talking about what he calls The Long Dark … the descent into soul.

We must learn to sit in the dark together and learn how to hear what wants to speak to us. "Become patient enough to listen to the dreaming earth."

Different "gates" of sorrows/griefs:

Gate 1: Losing someone or something that you loved (the only culturally acceptable form of grief.)

Gate 2: The parts of us that have never known love, the parts that we have cleaved off as non-acceptable. Hold those parts in contempt. The parts that make us most human are outcast. We can't grieve what we hold in contempt.

Gate 3: Sorrows of the world. Terror and grief with our culture, our neighborhood, our planet.

Gate 4: What we expected and did not receive. Things we all long for ... village to sit and sing with. Sharing dreams and stories. Feeling empty and lonely. What we have forgotten.

Gate 5: Ancestral grief ... where did our family stories began. Did not begin with me ... began a long time ago.

Notes from the video interview with Michael Lerner:

Weller says we need to develop the capacity to endure a long period of uncertainty. A new way of seeing in the dark.

Soul centered psychotherapy. The long dark is a time when the soul emerges.
What do you mean by soul? Not speaking about it in the metaphysical religious sense I'm talking about psychological center psyche. Psyche is the Greek word for soul so to engage So to engage soul is to engage our own thinking around death so when I talk about the long dark, we could say that the succession of the rising and now the introduction of descent. Descent takes us into the territory of the soul. Soul has to do with what is low, what is close to the ground, what is vulnerable, what is weak, what is close to earth or tenderness or grief. This is not about strength or control or rising. it is really about dropping down to the ground. we are being taken down into a place where humility is much more noble than mastery.

Soul lives in the entanglement between us and this incredible sensual and erotic place that we call earth.

And between friendships. That is where soul manifests itself most explicitly. Soul is this multi-faceted multi-dimensional experience ... it has to do with beauty imagination, ritual and grief, elderhood , community ....

How can we navigate through this long dark?

"Apprenticeship with sorrow ... grief will be ever-present in your life." Grief is a core human faculty. We don't know how to turn toward it. Grief has always been communal. Now becoming private and individual. We have to lose control but we have lost our faith in grief.

Bottomline: Listening to Weller talk triggered a lot of feelings. I feel like something significant is happening on this journey. We are attracting something powerful and I feel frightened and a tendency to want to shut down, go back to familiar ground, safe ground, mind ground, Professor ground. Once again, I am a bit overwhelmed by all of this, all of these feelings arising ... fear, sorrow, grief, as well as gratitude, love, and joy. I'm pretty sure none of this would be happening if you weren't here. I am so grateful you are, even though my rational mind still doesn't comprehend why.