Honoring Seasonal and Personal Crossroads and Thresholds

Image of Goddess Artio on the card is from Danu Forest’s Celtic Goddesses, Witches and Queens Oracle deck.

Yesterday marked the celebration of Halloween — known to the ancient Celts as Samhain. Samhain, pronounced “sow-win,”translated to “Summer’s End” and was one of the ancient fire festivals. This marked the 3rd and final harvest and was considered the end of the year where the thresholds between beginning and end, life and death, light and darkness, material and spirit were very thin.

This week I started working with a new deck in the mornings — Danu Forest’s Celtic Goddesses, Witches and Queens Oracle. I happened to draw Artio which was amazingly fitting. Artio is an ancient Celtic Bear Goddess. As such, she holds within her the power and ferocity of the bear, but also the instinctual need to hibernate — to retreat to the darkness, birth new life, and re-enter the light in a new way.

This card, and this time of year, reminds us to honor our instinctual need to go inward. To enter the mysterious, primordial darkness — where known meets unknown — and trust that new light and fresh vitality will be found again.

The logical mind often resists the unknown, it prefers predictability and routine of habit. Even if those habits are causing dissonance, or harm, on some level. Of course the mind energy’s intention is to serve our safety and survival — but there are many more aspects to our energy that can serve us other than the mind alone.

In fact, our mental certitude, and hyper-reliance on logic and analysis can sometimes cause us to get stuck. Blocks may form that keep us from receiving our other energies that serve our well-being in a more expansive and authentic way.

That’s where sound comes in. It has the ability to work with the different aspects of our energy, as well as with the thresholds where different aspects of our energy meet and intersect.

How does it do this? Sound pressure waves are geometric in nature — they include overtones and undertones that span increasingly subtle and denser frequencies according to specific ratios. The subtle frequencies of sound matched with intention helps us work with the ‘knowns’ of our mind energy. But it also transcends the mind to access and integrate the and more mysterious energies of our emotions and the ethereal and symbolic energies of soul and spirit. Also, the denser or slower frequencies penetrate into our cellular tissues. And so, sound energy can help us integrate and align body, emotions, mind, soul and spirit.

As we cross this threshold in the wheel of the year, it’s time to honor the different crossroads we embody. It is up to us how we choose to tune into the different aspects of our nature, harmonize them with each other and with the bigger picture.

I will look forward to seeing you!