The Swans of Becoming

Dear friends,

There is something about Hilma af Klint’s swans that arrests us mid-breath.

In The Swan, No. 17 (or perhaps another from her series, each one a meditation on union), we see it: the intertwining of black and white, shadow and light, held within a single form. Not opposing forces locked in battle, but lovers in an eternal embrace. The swan becomes a vessel for what Jung called the coniunctio oppositorum - the sacred marriage of opposites that marks every genuine spiritual awakening.

Hilma painted these swans between 1914 and 1915, during her own profound opening to what she called “the temple.” She understood that transformation doesn’t come from transcending our darkness but from finally, courageously, including it. The black swan and white swan are not two swans - they are one being, whole and undivided, their necks forming a heart, their bodies creating a circle with no beginning and no end.

Lately, these swans have been appearing in my sessions. One of my brilliant clients homed in on this image, and it has stayed with me these last few weeks, teaching me something I’m still learning to articulate. I find myself learning to love, in my core, in my bones, the nature of this reality, which always includes the dark and the light. It’s inescapable. And isn’t this exactly what the swans teach? That wholeness is not a destination but a practice of return. A daily choosing to stop splitting ourselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts, into the persona we show the world and the shadow we hide even from ourselves.

Perhaps it’s no accident that these swans have found me now, as we cross the threshold into November - into the season of darkness. In the Celtic tradition, this is Samhain, the turning of the year when the veil grows thin and we’re asked to turn inward, to tend the inner flame as the outer world retreats into shadow. The ancient ones understood something: that darkness is not the absence of light, but its necessary companion. That we keep the light alive by honoring the darkness, not by denying it.

Jung wrote: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

I often feel guilty for my shortcomings. I feel I’m not doing enough. I feel I am not emotionally mature, not giving, and supportive enough of those I love. I still feel shame around my shadow sides which feel young, wild, reactive, and sometimes overwhelmed and confused. Very slowly I’m learning to love and open to these parts. I know it sounds trite - what a million therapists before me have said - but the depth of this truth dawns on me daily and deepens with every passing season.

These young, wild, reactive parts - the ones that feel overwhelmed and confused - these are not obstacles to spiritual maturity. They are the work itself. They are the black swan asking to be held with the same tenderness as the white. Every impulse to push them away, to shame them into silence, is a rejection of the wholeness I’m learning to embody.

Living here in Cornwall is teaching me what the city couldn’t because it refuses to let me escape the cycles. The tide doesn’t apologize for receding. The garden doesn’t feel guilty for its dormant season. Nature simply is - dark and light, growth and decay, wildness and rest - and it asks nothing of us but our witness. As the days grow shorter and the light fades earlier each evening, the land itself is teaching me about the sacred necessity of descent, of turning inward, of letting things die back so they can be reborn.

And being a caregiver to three children - what better initiators into the mysteries? They will not let me maintain the fiction of the “good mother” who never feels rage, exhaustion, or the desperate wish to run away. They crack me open daily, asking me to meet them (and myself) in the full catastrophe of aliveness.

This is the dance I’m learning: not the performance of spiritual bypassing where we exile the shadow in pursuit of perpetual light, but the integration - the trembling, imperfect practice of making room for it all. The joy and the pain. The passion and the mundane. The moments I feel flooded with love and the moments I feel despairingly alone.

Hilma’s swans show us that the sacred is found not in choosing one over the other, but in the union itself — in the point where opposites meet and discover they were never truly separate. The heart-shaped space between them is where life actually happens. Where we actually live.

I truly am a whole person, and those I love are truly whole. My relationships are whole, and in that wholeness they hold the light and the dark, the joy and the pain, the passion and the mundane. Any tension, depression, and anxiety has a root in my resistance to this fact. It separates me from the deepest love I know is possible.

This tension - this depression, this anxiety - these aren’t evidence of failure. They’re the tension of a soul learning to hold more than it once thought possible. Jung called this the *transcendent function* - the psyche’s capacity to create a third thing from the conflict between opposites, something greater than either pole alone.

We are all becoming that third thing. Not light, not dark, but whole. Not perfect, but real. Not without shadow, but finally, bravely willing to dance with it.

The swans have found me for a reason, and perhaps they’ve found us at this threshold moment - as the wheel turns toward winter, as we’re invited to descend into our own depths and discover what light we can tend there. The Celtic peoples knew that this season asks us to become like the swans: to hold both the darkness and the light within the same body, the same heart, the same breath.

I’m letting them keep teaching me what they taught Hilma: to recognize ourselves as the place where light and dark have always been lovers. There is no shortcoming in this becoming. There is only the eternal return to wholeness, and the courage to keep opening when every instinct says to close. May this season of darkness teach us all to keep the inner flame alive — not by banishing the shadow, but by finally, tenderly, welcoming it home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

With love,

Hannah Green MFT