Hello darkness my old friend…
In the past few weeks there has been much excitement and interest as many people planned for the best(eyes protected) view of the recent solar eclipse, billed as a once in a lifetime event. Yet it is so very common to be in the dark, sometimes in the middle of the day! The darkness of a full solar eclipse lasting just a few minutes felt celebratory and intriguing; the darkness that sometimes accompanies daily life struggles, or bigger moments of grief or crisis sometimes does not feel like a gift. And while the total eclipse began and ended at predictable times that we set our watches and phones to, emotional darkness can feel never-ending.
What is it about darkness that frightens us so that we run from it, push it away and work to avoid it rather than go deeper into it to find the gem of clarity that awaits?
I love the Mary Oliver poem that someone gave to me after my father died many years ago.
The Uses of Sorrow
(in my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this too, was a gift.
The yin and yang symbol reminds us of the polarities of the cosmos: birth and death, light and dark, creation and destruction, hot and cold, feminine and masculine qualities and so on. The circle of the yin yang is split into two sides, representing the dichotomies of existence. Within each hemisphere is an aspect of its own negation, so light IN dark and birth IN death. This represents the balance between opposites as well as the idea that balance cannot exist without some tension and diversity. Yin and Yang are in everything, and all things, including us, are a combination of both.
Can we learn to sit in stillness and quiet to connect with our intuition and perhaps touch into some struggles and sadness, while also knowing that the light exists in us and around us too?
Sitting with challenges and a sense of darkness can be an invitation to transformation, like a caterpillar going into a cocoon where we enter a liminal space of darkness to go through transition and arrive on the other side a different person.
Like seeds planted in the dark soil, the deep changes in our lives often must start in the darkness.
Can we learn to welcome the less comfortable emotions that might feel like darkness in the moment and trust that we must “feel it to heal it” and that the other side of the struggle is more freedom?
I hope that we humans stay very excited and interested to continue to gaze at the sky and to spend time in nature long after the April 8th Solar eclipse recedes into memory, perhaps with eyes closed and feeling the warmth of the sun or the cool moon of the night sky bathing us in her beauty.
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