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
Approach
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.