Lessons from the Dark
I’ve been swallowed up by the fury of summer. You too? As the previous New Moon entered, in August, I had a transformative experience at a gathering of friends. I entered into the community space with an awareness of the coming of the New Moon, a period marked by the darkness, of night and of life. I tend to save this space in time as one of solitude and processing, but these days I am not prone to turning down a chance to gather with familiar faces, and so I prepared myself to hold space for whatever may occur. In my personal journal, I made a note to embrace the dark, to not turn from it in fear.
As the night unfolded I wandered into the depths of mystery, like a moonflower opening slowly to the waning light. A moment was presented for me to lean into the heaviness of the void, and I did so with enthusiasm. I may have lingered there a bit longer than was comfortable—pressing into the darkness can have that effect— but I came out on the other side having articulated to another person my exact thoughts on an issue that had been lingering with me for months, like a personal storm cloud blocking the sunshine from reaching my light-starved cells. The cynicism that had followed me loyally since the Spring felt suddenly lifted, as if a switch within me had been flipped.
The next day, as I moved about my yard in solitude and relative quiet, reflecting on the events of the evening, I heard a rustle. I stopped abruptly, my ears tuning themselves like an attentive rabbit toward the sound I had perceived. And then, I spotted the source: like a visitor from another world, a massive, 5-foot-long black garden snake made itself known to me. I may have mentioned in past posts that attracting a snake to my garden was a high priority, something I hadn’t taken many tangible steps with but, more so in a spiritual sense, had been sending intentional energy towards. The snake, the visitor, the New Moon darkness, and the lifting of my cynicism in the face of it all conjured a sense of the Peak Experience. Whenever I hit on a moment of discovery like this, my cells ripple with a sense awe and belonging. Similar to the experience of deja vu, it feels like the universe whispering, “Ah, there you are.”
So often, the darkness gets villainized in modern culture— a complex historical dive I won’t go into right now for likelihood of falling down a never-ending research hole. Simply, I’m here to say this: that I recognize the effects of social conditioning on my own relationship to the dark, to the night, and to the unknown. And that I’m learning the value of pushing against the proclivity to let it manifest a fear response in me. One of my favored authors, Helen Hoover, who lived in the deep northern woods of Minnesota in the 1950s, often wrote of her midnight walks in the forests surrounding her home. Walking by moonlight, or none at all, she became intimately familiar with the ground beneath her feet, acutely aware of her surroundings, tuned in to every minute sound. The darkness offers something that the light does not: silence, time to reflect, a void of the intense stimulation often accompanying daytime.
And so, as I move forward through life, I like to imagine myself hand-in-hand, sandwiched between the two polar worlds, taking in the lessons from each, without judgement or fear.