The Descent: Returning to the Root
October opens the veil
The Harvest Moon has waned, and October ushers us into the holy hush between worlds — a time when veils thin, shadows lengthen, and the ancestors lean in close.
This is the Season of Descent — not a collapse, but a calling.
A descent into remembering.
Into the fertile dark where truth grows.
The soil knows this.
The trees know this.
They do not resist the falling away.
They understand that decay is devotion — a sacred return to source.
And so, too, must we.
The light shifts, the harvest wanes, and nature begins her slow exhale.
Everything that once stretched toward the sun now begins to turn inward.
And so must we.
The Descent is not about death; it’s about truth.
It’s about the body’s wisdom to release, the spirit’s willingness to listen, and the earth’s reminder that endings are not failures, but fertilizer.
The Wisdom of the Waning Light
As the Harvest Moon fades, nature teaches us to trust the dark.
In Western culture, light has been sanctified and darkness demonized, a projection rooted in racialized theology, colonial fear, and the desire for control.
But the Earth knows better. Darkness is not evil; it’s essential. It’s where seeds split and roots anchor. It’s where gestation happens.
Modernity has conditioned us to fear the dark, but the dark is where creation begins. In the natural world, the waning light is not a warning; it’s a signal for slowing down, conserving, and listening inward.
Yet whiteness — as a system — taught us to equate light with purity and darkness with danger. That binary lives in our language, our theology, our nervous systems.
The descent asks you to challenge that.
To unlearn the racialized fear of the dark — both external and internal.
When you step into this season with reverence, the darkness becomes a sanctuary, not a sentence.
The descent teaches that the dark is not the absence of light, it is the womb of it.
It asks: What if illumination is not about exposure, but about intimacy… seeing what can only be witnessed in the dark?
The waning light reminds us that our worth is not measured by our visibility or our productivity.
The practice of descent begins here: choosing to see differently.
Descent as Devotion
Falling is not failure. It is faith. The trees don’t cling to their leaves in resistance; they trust the cycle. They know loss is part of longevity.
Every leaf that falls is an act of faith. The trees are not dying (that’s the language of colonization)— they’re conserving. They release what no longer serves so that what’s alive at the core can survive the cold.
Our nervous systems mirror this same rhythm. In times of overwhelm, we retract to preserve energy. But many of us have been conditioned to resist that natural retreat, labeling it laziness or depression instead of wintering.
Descent asks the same of us:
To loosen our grip on performance, perfectionism, and the illusion that control equals safety. Those are all symptoms of supremacy culture… the nervous system of capitalism.
Descent as devotion means releasing productivity as proof of worth and allowing yourself to be held by what is unseen. It is where self-care matures into collective care.
Descent as devotion is learning to follow nature’s lead. It’s asking your body,
“What am I ready to release so I can rest?”, “Where am I still trying to hold up the branches when I should be nourishing the roots?”
Devotion, in this context, is an act of rest. Not rest as reward, but rest as resistance, a rebellion against the myth that you must earn ease.
This is sacred surrender, not to despair, but to alignment.
The Season of Ancestral Remembrance
October is a time when cultures around the world pause to honor the dead and commune with the unseen.
From Samhain in Celtic lands to Día de los Muertos in Mexico, Obon in Japan, All Souls Day in Christian traditions, and countless African, Indigenous, and diasporic practices — this is a collective act of remembering that we are never alone in the work of becoming.
But remembrance isn’t uniform. For those descended from European ancestry, there’s a different initiation happening here, an invitation to remember before whiteness.
Before “white,” there were clans, languages, songs, and kinship with land.
Before empire, there was earth. Before supremacy, there was story.
Colonization didn’t just harm the colonized; it severed the colonizer from their own sacred roots. And so, ancestral remembrance for white-bodied folks must begin with grief:
grieving the theft of your own lineage
the loss of your people’s rituals
and the ways whiteness taught you to fear the very ancestors who could help you (re)member.
This is not a conceptual project. It is an embodied one.
It’s feeling the weight of the stories buried under “whiteness,” and beginning to unearth them. It’s the trembling that comes when your body remembers something older than the system you inherited. This is the season when humanity pauses to remember that we are never alone in the work of becoming.
Every culture, in its own language, says the same thing:
Death is not departure. It is dialogue.
And remembrance is how we keep that conversation alive.
Not as a slogan. Not as a performance of “wokeness.” Not as a distancing statement like “I’m a non-practicing white.”(insert eyeroll)
That’s not remembrance, that’s avoidance dressed as humility.
But as an embodied, grief-filled journey of reclamation.
To find your way back to the human being inside the category.
This is spiritual work.
It’s somatic work.
It’s ancestral repair.
The ancestors you most need to remember are not the ones glorified by empire (those are forefathers), they are the ones erased by it.
The wise women silenced by witch hunts.
The peasants displaced for enclosure.
The pagans forced into pews.
The storytellers whose tongues were taxed for speaking their own names.
To remember them is to refuse the system that buried them.
It is to choose restoration over replication.
It is to let the descent carry you home.
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