We Begin in Darkness

Turning toward the light

I hope this missive, whether it arrives in your inbox or you stumble across it, finds you well. This is a joyous time for some and a complex, painful time for others. Whatever type of season you’re having, I’m sending you love.

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

Our relationship with the world around us is not a metaphor or a simile, a tricky twist of language and thought. It is us. We are it. The construction is not our inextricable interweaving, but the idea that we are ever separate at all.

I feel this enduring interweaving with the world most palpably at the Winter Solstice when the Sun is furthest away and the night the deepest. In my gut, I sense how I am nestled deeply in the womb, the burrow, the den. Waiting.

It is where everything begins, in darkness.

I don’t dispute the Big Bang Theory. That would be way above my pay grade. But I do think it’s worth remembering, that story is told from the perspective of the thing created and not from that of the creator. No need to personify. I’m not talking about the Creator, though thinking of it that way is meaningful for many. I’m saying there’s something before the creation, out of which the creation is birthed. It is not a nothing, a space of endless absence, any more than a womb and the possessor of that womb is no one, just a precursor. Before what is created a vessel of pure possibility exists— the chalice out of which life pours.

Before the light is darkness— necessary and potent.

Did you know that the vast majority of babies are born in the nighttime, or the wee hours just before dawn? It is tempting to imagine they know consciously, but the truth is they know on a primal, animal level— emerging out of the cradle of the womb, the safest, most gentle entrance into the world outside is through the darkness. 

The instinct to slowly ease into the harsh glare of life is hard for us to understand in our modern culture. Electricity and technology and post-industrial production resist the dark, laugh at it, refuse to submit, which I suspect on a deep, elemental level drives us somewhat mad. As if we have lost the ground under our feet and are just sliding down an endless scree with nothing to hold onto, a frantic scream always about to bubble up into our rational, light-filled lives.

Songwriter Leonard Cohen famously said the cracks are where the light gets in, but in the endlessly looping dance of the Earth with the Sun, light doesn’t push through anything. It seeps and creeps, waxing to fullness incrementally. As part and parcel of this planetary system, encoded in our DNA is the instruction: turn in the direction of that hint of creeping light, that barest suggestion of a glimmer, and head toward it.

Maybe faith is not an act of will, an investment in a daydream. Maybe it is simply a deep remembering from the beginning that the light is coming and we must rise to meet it.

By the time you receive this, we will have had the longest night and the shortest day here in the Northern Hemisphere. We will have turned back toward the light. And the light will continue to grow no matter what we do. It does not depend on our belief, which is a comfort since beliefs are so bound up in our stories and egos. The light and dark exist beyond these constructions and invite us to release them and rest.

That’s what I’ll be doing (and I hope the same for you) as we creep toward the New Year and the third anniversary of the newsletter, which is also the day after my birthday. I’ll be back next week with a year-end wrap-up and then I’m going away to the woods. I’ll queue something up for our anniversary week, but I won’t be live with you, responding to comments and otherwise connecting.

I know in the frenzy of the holidays it can be hard to welcome in the dark and the quiet, but I encourage you to try. Why? Because so much of the harm we cause is because we can’t sit with darkness– ours, other people’s, the world’s– and allow ourselves the deep emotions or the unknowing to be found there. 

We have stripped out the rituals from the cycle of the year that allow us to get our feet on the ground and remember we don’t have to fear the dark. Or make it fearsome by projecting all of our unacknowledged or unmanaged material upon it. Darkness is our beginning and our ending, our rest and our refuge. And though there are some journeys into and out of darkness that are singular ones from the perspective of the created– birth and death being among them– that which creates is always with us.

It is dark now, still, but we are together in it. All of us, turning toward the light. It’s not a miracle, this annual journey out of darkness, but it’s right for it to feel that way because the passage, if we open ourselves to it, awakens our sense of wonder and possibility.

What a gift it is to be alive, we are reminded, to be part of the dance.

Photo by Miikka Luotio on Unsplash