Lupita (Mary Guadalupe Tree of Life)
Your steel points of light
Your branches of Light (Asherah)
glow in grave darkness.
Hecate’s second moon is Red.
The raven slices the sky into shards.
The river catches shivering stars.
We remember the First Mother…
Patiently, painfully,
we return the parts to the Whole.
See the Wolf who hides
behind the Tree,
the door?
Welcome him in.
Only then can we begin…
Lupita,
Your needled points of light
glow in grave darkness.
This kind of prayer is said during the dark months when shadows are feared and the nights are long. I use it at the solstice or the full moon before the winter solstice, a fire festival. But it can be used any time during the dark months. There are good reasons for this kind of prayer. It is so important to acknowledge our shadow and to invite him/her in as a friend, not as an enemy. Otherwise harmful projections occur as we place undesirable qualities that we can’t own onto others.
In Indigenous traditions there are always masked personages that act out these shadow qualities in sometimes very humorous or scary ways. The Tewa have a masked dancer who uses a whip to strike the ground. In central Europe masked dancers walk the streets creating havoc in rural areas even today. These figures are acting out the shadow in us all, keeping it present so this energy does not go underground where it can become quite deadly.
Sara is a naturalist, ethologist (a person who studies animals in their natural habitats) (former) Jungian Pattern Analyst, and a writer. She publishes her work regularly in a number of different venues and is presently living in Maine.
feminismandreligion.com 
Wow. Yes, our winter shadow is our friend. Wolves can be friendly and can be our friends. The raven is our friend. The beautiful moon is our friend. Isn’t life sooooo much better when we are friendly and when we are surrounded by friends? Bright and friendly blessings for the winter and to you and to all of us. Gee, let’s make 2022 a friendlier year.
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Some friends are harder to like than others and I think our shadows might be one of them! So in your words Bravo!
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You have such a gift for finding the right prayer or ceremony at the right time. I once went to a goddess camp in New Hampshire and in order to get to the main celebration we all had to walk through a dark woods where we met “Kali” (one of the organizers in a very realistic costume) and figure out what to do to get past her, and the answer was “to dance” – we had to dance with Kali to get to where we needed to be. Your insights and poem reminds me of that – we have to dance with our own shadow and be positively transformed by it or we never get to where our destiny wants to lead us. This is such a beautiful prayer – I’m going to keep it for when I go out on a solstice night!
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Carolyn, I wish i could take credit for these things but I can’t -I have been celebrating ritual for almost 40 years – 8 times a year and once a month at full moon. What has happened over the years is that these things sort of write themselves – I get stuff from dreams and/or nature . I am most definitely NOT the director – I follow the nudges.. I know that I need to release something and set intentions for each and wait to find out what they are… or sometimes I know….and then Nature does the rest….I am delighted that you want to use the prayer.
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