Life as Teacher; Part Two The Spiral of Preciousness

Descent and Initiation

This week carries the energy of remembrance.Samhain has just passed, the Celtic turning of the year when the veil thins, and across the world candles have been lit for the Day of the Children and the Day of the Dead. Though these traditions arise from different lineages, they share one heartbeat: honoring life and death as inseparable companions, feeding the memory of those we love, and acknowledging that we too belong to this great circle of continuity.

I feel that current moving through me now, the spiral that life keeps turning, inviting me once again to face what has been lost and to see what is still alive.

In this moment, I light a candle for my son and his precious soul. Even though he has crossed beyond this world, I feel him living on in the most beautiful of ways, not gone but expanded. He came as a messenger between realms, reminding me that help arrives when we need it most, often in ways we don’t expect.

And sometimes awakening doesn’t come softly. It can arrive like a giant light stick from the cosmos, whacking you upside the head until you finally remember who you are.

Through him, I learned that the call to wake up rarely feels graceful. It burns, breaks, and remakes us, yet always with a kind of divine precision that leaves us more whole than before.This is the spiral of initiation, the ancient path that calls each of us in one form or another. It arrives as illness, loss, betrayal, change, whatever pierces the illusion of control and draws us into the deeper ground of truth.

When my son’s diagnosis came, fear rattled me to my bones. I was deeply terrified of losing him. I could not imagine a world without him in it. I tried to reason with death, to make a deal, to change what could not be changed. But death would not bargain. It was only asking me to surrender, to fall into the unknown, where love would become my teacher.

The descent was anything but clear. It was raw, disorienting, and at times unbearable. I could not see that I was navigating through fear, only that I was trying to survive what could not be controlled. It took years to truly understand that what felt like breaking was also remaking.

Even now, the spiral continues to turn. Recently, many years after my son’s passing, the Destroyer archetype rose again through my body, fierce and filled with an existential grief I had not yet touched. It illuminated a layer of sorrow and despair that had lived quietly inside me, waiting for its time to be seen.

This is the nature of the journey. It does not end. The soul keeps circling back, bringing forward what is ready to heal. Each encounter is both a reckoning and a renewal, an invitation to meet life more honestly, more fully, more awake.

There are moments in every life that undo us.

Moments when the ground gives way and everything we thought we could hold begins to dissolve.We cannot grow without these thresholds. We cannot awaken without being broken open.

Awakening does not arrive in light alone. It comes through the ache of loss, through the tearing open of what we love most, through the unmaking of the self that once felt certain. Pain is not punishment. It is initiation. It asks us to see what is real, to soften where we have hardened, to remember what we have forgotten. Every awakening begins in darkness.

We carry the sacred wound as a teacher and companion.

It walks beside us, shaping who we become,

whispering its lessons whenever we drift too far from truth.

Each time we forget, it reminds us.

Each time we close, it opens us again.

This is the spiral, the continual turning toward what hurts and heals, destroys and restores. It is not a philosophy but a path we walk, one that humbles and transforms us, returning us again and again to the luminous heart of being alive.

Alchemical Process and Time

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." Attributed to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Through the fire, tenderness emerged.

Through the fear, devotion.

Through the breaking, love, vast, enduring, alive beyond form.

One day, shortly after my son Syrus’ passing, I was feeling sad and sorry for myself, caught in the heaviness of missing him. Then I heard his familiar voice say, Let’s take a walk. You listen better when you’re outside in nature.

As I walked beneath the trees, I felt his presence beside me. He said gently, "We are all like the mariposa, in a constant state of transformation and change. It is true for each one of us. Even for me, in death, I am only shifting form. There is no end for any of us."

I could feel the truth of his words move through me. This truth was an invitation to reimagining my perspective of death. In that moment, I began to see that love does not vanish, it evolves. Death is not the end of relationship, but the reimagining of it. The relationship changes, and so must we. It asks us to meet in new ways, to listen differently, to recognize that connection continues, just beyond the edges of what we once knew.

Over time, I began to realize that the love I felt for my son could be expanded into the many things in this world that are worth fighting for, the waters, the trees, the animals, the fragile beauty that holds us all. Love is a force to be used, a current to keep the beauty of this world alive. It is the same love, only widened.

This is an alchemical process. It cannot be rushed or timed. When we are doing the deep work of the soul, time becomes irrelevant. There is no timeline for transformation, only the slow turning of the spiral, the quiet digestion of experience that ripens into wisdom. This process can be the work of a lifetime, unfolding in layers, each descent and rising carrying us closer to the essence of who we truly are.

The Preciousness of Now

The spiral continues its turning, always leading us home, to the breath, the heartbeat, the quiet grace of what remains.

Nothing is guaranteed. Tomorrow is never promised. Each moment is sacred.

Even in exhaustion and heartbreak, love abides. It breathes in the spaces between words, in the warmth of touch, in the knowing that every soul’s journey, no matter how brief, is complete in its purpose.

An Invitation

As we move through this threshold season of remembrance, I offer these reflections:

• What initiations are you being asked to face?

• What ancestral patterns are rising to be tended or transformed through you?

• Where is love asking to grow stronger than fear?

Perhaps this is one of life’s greatest teaching, that the spiral is always turning, inviting us not to resist the darkness, but to meet it with courage, trust, and awe, for it is here, in the dark, that the light is born.