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In the fall season, Nature leaves behind the powers of light, drawing inward to stillness and the sacred dark of Mother Earth, where the sleeping potential of new life resides.

So too your spiritual journey calls you inward to quiet and reflection, compelling you to seek within the secret desires, dormant gifts and lost stories of your inner sacred dark where your sleeping potential resides. New beginnings await you in the sacred dark.

Here are four lessons to deepen your spiritual work in the fall season.

1. Step beyond the world you know, and turn your awareness toward the unknown of the sacred dark.

Commit to travel the deepest roots of your spiritual journey. Call up your courage and determination. Lessen your grip on the things you hold true and dear. Open to the mysteries of your inner sacred dark, and let them guide your spiritual work.

2. What you hunger for waits for you in the sacred dark.

Heed your soul’s hunger to seek out your greater becoming. Whatever you truly need to be whole waits for you in the sacred dark of your inner landscape. Here you can discover and reclaim the lost, precious parts of yourself that can nourish your soul and make your life anew.

3. Suffering and sacrifice are integral parts of your spiritual work.

Don’t expect your spiritual work to be pretty or easy. Honor the lessons and experiences that come to you, especially those that challenge you the most. Know that this is how life is meant to teach and grow you. Great beauty, wisdom and resilience emerge from the depth of your struggles.

4. It’s the journey itself that transforms you.

You grow and mature by consciously engaging your life experiences, both the positive and negative. It’s this very toil of sweat and soul that changes you. Life, with its joys and sorrows, is the crucible of your greater becoming.

Artwork: Karen Koski

Winters here are rough.

The photo shows one of the last tiny harvests before the cold locks me indoors for too many days.

In the jar is lemon balm—wee clippings from the very top of the plant, since the lower leaves are already weathered beyond use. Likewise, the jar holds a mere five inches of nettle leaves and nettle seeds from the top of a stalk.

The harvest also includes gorgeously dark peppermint and some fuzzy, pale mint. The square-stemmed plant is ready to assault my tongue with glory, if there’s enough mint in the jar to storm my tastebuds. If not, a more gentle mint taste will sweeten and enliven the tea blend. 

Jord, pronounced Yord, rhymes with horde, is the mother of Thor. Her name means earth.

Jord goes by her alternate name in the Fireverse and is part of the twin pair Fjorgyn and Fjorgynn.The name Fjorgynn is linguistically related to the names of thunder gods in other Indo-European cultures.

Frigga wears cloud gray. Sometimes she wears a blue head scarf. In the stories in which she and Odin favor different champions, they are not truly antagonists but are engaging in a contest they both enjoy, pitting the universe’s two best minds against each other, somewhat like playing chess. There is one thing they genuinely disagree on, and that is the best way to handle prophecy. While Odin tries his best to fulfill prophecy, Frigga tries to use knowledge of the future to change the future.

Frigga makes a lot of fiber art, and makes all the clothes for Odin’s family. When Thor and Loki were unmarried and lived with Odin, that included them too.

This is one in a series of posts about our pantheon. Find the full list of the whole series here.

Up this week: the goddess Antheia, one of the triplicity of goddesses who are daughters of the Three Mothers in our pantheon. You can read about the other two daughter goddesses: Ariadne and Arachne. And of course, the Mothers have sons as well. We'll get to them as we move along in this series.

Odin’s mother Bestla was Jotun, but she and her husband, the Asa god Bor, made their home in Asgard when all the worlds were new.

In my novel gnosis, Bestla died in the First War. Odin’s grief was so great that he decided to make war itself a sacred thing in her honor. He had been building a hall for himself near his parents’ hill dwelling, but after their deaths he moved into the hill and finished his hall as Valhalla, a place for his chosen warriors.