I am not scared of the dark, but I am scared of the darkness. In the dark, your eyes can adjust, you can see outlines or shapes. There is always a shadow reminding you of where the direction of light is coming from. In the darkness, there is no light for your eyes to adjust to. There is no fire to keep you warm. There is no shadow.

In the darkness, it is my self huddled in a corner scared of what I cannot see. It is the shaking, and the inner turmoil that continues to haunt my mind, to play tricks and tell me lies. It is the scabs of my past that won’t heal, but rather festers and grows ever painful, regardless to how to try to address and treat the problem.

Months ago I asked Herne to teach me about the Wild Hunt, and in return I would concentrate on my health. Then my grandfather died, university got rolling and my health took a back seat. With the recent wild Sydney weather, a cold that doesn’t want to properly start and only two more assignments to go, walking outside doesn’t seem exciting. Excuse no. 2, and 3, and 4 and so on. But as Awenydd recently mentioned, sometimes the Gods will give you that “kick in the teeth” to get you moving.

As I have mentioned before, both here and at Too Fat for a Broomstick, I have premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) which I prefer to call, “hormonal bipolar.” Generally I’m a complete “super mega bitch” (to put it lightly) for two weeks once every second month (I at least have one good ovary), the bleeding begins, and I’m ok again.

Well, this time the switch didn’t go back to it’s usual position and I’m still in that “super mega bitch” mentality… and it’s suffocating. I’m finding that my mentality is resorting back to how I was in the early 00’s (height of my “emo before emo was emo” days) and even quoting lyrics by The Moffatts and early Good Charlotte in my little “search and destroy” vent notebook.

Well, this is all part of the learning process, isn’t it? As we approach Samhain here in the Southern Hemisphere, as we approach Yule and Herne’s night of the Wild Hunt, so begins the dark descent into the mind of the girl I’ve fought so hard to escape from. Maybe that’s the wrong phrase – I’ve grown, and she’s still tied to my apron strings.

Cosette at magickly.com put it beautifully in a recent post about Shadow Work, and this is exactly what I’m being lead into. I’ve been dangling my feet in the shallow end of Shadow work for the last month and a bit (before Poppy’s passing) but it looks like I’ve just been pushed into the deep end.

The hardest bit for me to grasp in all of this is that I thought I had dealt with everything I needed to deal with. The idea that a fragment of who I used to be still lingers within my being annoys me to no end. Even harder still is that I know it’s all in my mind.

Thankfully, I have a Patron who is in every sense a Dark Lord. Not to be confused with the world of Harry Potter, but as the Pagan community seems to concentrate on the Dark Goddess, sometimes we forget that their male counterparts can be ruthless bastards, too. They, too, can lead you into the darkest corners of your soul, find the buried issues that are so far deep and buried that you’ve forgotten they were there, and then whip them out into the light for you to see and, force you to work through them because they know, within all of your stupid little excuses, that you are ready to work through them. You’ve been putting this off long enough, and now it’s time.

So it looks like I still have some mega crazy issues lying in wait, but I will make Herne hold the torch while I work through them as I cannot do this alone. He is a Dark God, but he’s not a complete bastard.