We can make darkness an enemy…or learn how to embrace it as a friend.
They walked on in silence for a little while. Presently
Anne said, "Do you know, Captain Jim, I never like walking with a lantern. I have always the strangest feeling that just outside the
circle of light, just over its edge in the darkness, I am surrounded by a ring of furtive, sinister things, watching me from the shadows
with hostile eyes. I've had that feeling from childhood. What is the reason? I never feel like that when I'm really in the darkness--when
it is close all around me--I'm not the least frightened."
"I've something of that feeling myself," admitted Captain Jim. "I reckon
when the darkness is close to us it is a friend. But when we sorter push it away from us----divorce ourselves from it, so to
speak, with lantern light--it becomes an enemy."
Excerpt from Anne’s house of dreams by L.M. Montgomery
Fear Not the Darkness
You, darkness, of whom I am born--
I love you more than the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illuminates
and excludes
all the rest.
But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations--just as they are.
It
lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.
I believe in the night.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Abyss
There is an edge
within our living
sometimes hidden
never absent
an abyss
lurking
looming
alarmingly tenacious
an unshakeable
companion
Sometimes we name it Fear
or Yearning
sometimes Beauty
the Unknown
or Emptiness
the seeking after something more
the rose garden
glimpsed through the tiny door
unforgettable
not untouched by terror
Papering over the abyss
is simple enough…
the nails and boards
are sold in any store…
but illusory
for it thereby gains in strength
and urgency.
Just when it seems safely tucked away
controlled, contained,
tamed,
defused,
it sneaks or bounds back in.
Yielding to the abyss
is risky
dangerous
senseless
unimaginable
terrifying
mad
and terribly attractive
Mary
Marrocco
The dark, the unknown, can be quite terrifying, but when one is ready, surrendering to this unknown is often the way to healing.
Stories such as that of Abraham going on a journey without being told where he was going are seminal about this kind of surrender.
Exploration,
particularly of emotions, images, and dreams, brings to light this hidden world inside of us that contains the seeds of our healing.
In
my own journey, I came to a place of utter darkness. I had an image then of being far, far down, with not even ambient light around
me. There was a cool mist and I was on my hands and knees, but on bedrock. I felt no fear, but rather solidity, gratitude, freedom.
Yes, that was a moment of revelation: In the darkness comes healing, wholeness, freedom. We need not fear the dark.