The Fruitful Darkness

It has been a long while since I published a post on this blog, though I continue in the inquiry as much as ever. I intend to post here more regularly as a way of cataloging my learning and various expressions of my work and discovery in this area.

For this post, I will jump to The Fruitful Darkness, a theme I used for a recent gathering. It is that time of the year - when the daylight gives way to the darkness, the days getting shorter, our energies going inward. It would seem that societally, we do much to avoid or deny the darkness and the other experiences that accompany it (uncertainty, not knowing, fear, silence, solitude) as legitimate and (I would say) essential dimensions of our experience. This is so much the case that the degree of illumination around major cities in the world has impacted the migratory patterns of birds and other natural biologic cycles. So it bears some reflection, a willingness to move into the darkness and see the wisdom that nature offers us there.

David Whyte offers that the darkness provides us with a kind of discernment about what is true and essential to us:

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

What happens in the darkness that this way of seeing becomes possible when it may not be so possible in the light?