The Alchemy of Losing

A Candle in the Dark

I lost something this week.

Not in the way you misplace a set of keys or leave a scarf behind in a café. No, this loss was quieter, stranger, the kind that leaves a hollow humming in the chest, as though the body itself remembers what the mind cannot hold.

We are taught to think of loss as absence, a subtraction, a blank page where words once lived. But perhaps it is something else entirely. Loss is a threshold, a door that opens whether or not we are ready, and pushes us across into becoming. On the other side we are altered, not broken, not whole, simply… different.

A candle guttering in the dark is still a light. So too, perhaps, is what remains of us after loss.

The Alchemy of Defeat

Artists, dreamers, makers of impossible things. We live in the company of defeat.

Rejection letters gather like autumn leaves. The brush slips. The stage falls silent. What we thought would take flight collapses, featherless, into the dust.

But perhaps defeat is not an ending, only a transmutation. Loss is compost: all the dead things of yesterday sinking into the earth, feeding the tender green shoots of tomorrow.

Think of paint: how the black within it deepens every color it touches. Think of gold, born not in sunlight but in the crushing dark of the earth. What seems broken, wasted, failed, becomes the very matter of beauty.

Defeat is not the grave. It is the soil.

The Mythic Mirror

Myth has always known what we try to forget. Endings are doorways, not walls.

Kore walked once through a field of flowers, a maiden untouched by shadow. She was not yet Persephone, not yet the queen who would stride between the living and the dead. She was only the girl-before, a name that meant “maiden,” a version of herself that could not last.

When the earth opened, when loss came for her in the form of abduction, it was not the end of her story. It was the threshold. Kore crossed it, and emerged as Persephone: remade, renamed, sovereign of two worlds.

So myth whispers to us: to lose is to transform. To be taken is to be re-forged. Every story worth telling bends itself around an ending, and what comes after.

A Story from the Serpent

This Thursday at 11 AM, the Krewe opens its doors once more with The Prodigal Son Returns.

It is the tale of a haunting return, of a man who went into the dark and came back carrying shadows he cannot set down. Every choice clings, every silence shapes, and what was lost cannot be made whole again.

Like us, he discovers the truth: no one returns unchanged. The self who left is gone. What comes back is someone else, carrying the weight of the threshold they’ve crossed.

What We Carry Forward

The Gift of Losing

There is a strange alchemy in loss. It takes, yes, but it also gives.

When something falls away, it drags with it the masks we’ve been wearing, the half-truths we’ve borrowed, the comfortable voices that were never quite our own. Loss pares us down to the bone, and in that rawness, something remarkable can happen.

The work grows stranger. The voice grows sharper. What is left behind is lean, fierce, and alive, a truer reflection of who we are, and what we are meant to make.

Loss does not only hollow us; it hones us.

Invitation to the Reader

And so I turn the question back to you.

What have you lost, lately? A contest, a certainty, a piece of yourself you thought would never slip away?

Don’t soften it. Don’t explain it away. Sit with it. Hold it close. Write it down, paint it, whisper it into the night air. Loss is a seed, not a tombstone. And though it does not sprout when or how we demand, it does take root.

I’d love to hear your stories: your thresholds, your Persephone moments, your strange little hums in the dark. Share them with me. Let’s see what grows when we name what was taken.

Invitation to the Reader

I’ll leave you with a question, gentle but insistent:

What loss carved you into the person you are now?

Perhaps it was something small, almost forgettable: a door that never opened, a letter that never came. Or perhaps it was vast, a grief that cracked the world in half.

Did it leave you with something unexpected? A strength you hadn’t known, a tenderness, a voice you could finally claim as your own?

You don’t have to answer aloud. But if you wish, you can share your story with me, or simply hold it close, as proof that endings, too, are a kind of beginning.

Next Steps

So I will end with this small spell of affirmation:

This week, I am walking hand in hand with loss, and letting her show me what grows in the ruins.

The path is never empty. There are always stories waiting, always myths to remind us we are not alone in the dark.

Next steps:

🔮 Watch the new Tongue of the Serpent episode: The Prodigal Son Returns (premiering Thursday at 11 AM).

🌸 Friday on Loveday Meditations: join me for a journey with Kore, the maiden before the descent, standing on the edge of transformation.