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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

 Now our lady the Goddess had never loved,

but she would know all mysteries, even the mystery of Death,

so she journeyed to the Underworld.

So begins Wicca's foundational story of the Goddess's Descent into the Underworld.

It's an etiological masterpiece, the tale of the making of the First Witch. But for now, I'd like to linger here with this first sentence. Often it gets glossed over in a rush to get to the good stuff, but that's a shame, really. As a first sentence, it's a brilliant set-up, and my gods: talk about rich characterization.

Now our lady the Goddess had never loved... Well, there's your foreshadowing. You know exactly what's going to happen in this story: she's going to fall in love. That's the central mystery, after all. But look at what else it says about her.

The truly puzzling thing is, there's no dearth of Wiccan artists out there.

That's what makes the absence all the more striking.

The story of the Lady's Descent into the Underworld is, arguably, Wicca's foundational myth.

Where, then, is the art depicting it?

It's a profoundly visual story. One could readily envision sequences of the Descent à la (if you'll pardon the comparison) Catholicism's Stations of the Cross.

Where are they?

If you ask those who practice it, “Why skyclad?” twelve will get you thirteen you'll hear something along the lines of 1) energy flow, 2) social equalizing, and 3) a sense of separation from the ordinary.

Those may all be good answers, and they may even be true answers, but they're modern answers. They're not the answers the ancestors would have given.

If 1400 years ago you had asked a priest of the Hwicce tribe, “Why do you go naked to your worship?” had he been disposed to give you an answer at all he may well have said, “The Lady of the Hwicce instructed us so.”