“Always we want to learn from the outside, from absorbing other people’s knowledge. It’s safer that way. The trouble is that it’s always other people’s knowledge. We already have everything we need to know, in the darkness inside ourselves. The longing is what turns us inside out until we find the sun and the moon and the stars inside”*
Good Monday morning!
This morning I am contemplating my complicated feelings about being in the dark. There is the literal being in the dark, the lights are off, the sun is down and the power is out. Then, there is the other kind of being in the dark, the dark of not knowing, not knowing how you might feel, the dark of despair, the loneliness, the isolation, the grieving, these are also a kind of being in the dark.
In the history of our modern civilization, specifically from the Greeks, we humans have always done a kind of formal being in the dark from time to time. Sometimes it is called resting, sometimes it is called meditation, sometimes it is called vacation, but the Greeks called it incubation. People would enter huts or caves created or discovered for this purpose. These places would have little to no light, but would allow a person to enter and to lay down fully. A person who was incubating was cared for. Food and water would be brought to the person daily. The person who was incubating would determine for themselves when to enter and when to leave but people might stay in this way, doing nothing but being in the dark for sometimes months. They were there to discover there own being, to find themselves in the midst of a world that does not cater to each of us, a world that has its own momentum, its own rhythms.
To go down into the dark, willingly, to embrace the state of stillness, allow the dark to penetrate your being and clear you of worldly concerns for some period of time, this is a form of restoration, a nourishment for the body and soul. But to find yourself in the dark without warning or expectation, to be kept in the dark without choice, this then is something wholly different, a darkness of perhaps terrifying unknowing. Funny thing is, at the moment when we realize that we are in the dark, at that very moment, a choice is suddenly available. Before we knew we were in the dark, we were going along as if we knew, as if our knowledge was enough, but when we realize we were laboring in the dark, we can choose to “enlighten” ourselves. Enlightening ourselves might be as simple as getting more information about a situation, or it could be exactly the reverse. It could be we simply accept our darkness, agree to be in the dark, to let the darkness hold us until the light dawns.
I am captivated by the idea that our own light will dawn in deep darkness. I love to think that we can choose to remain in the dark, still, waiting, ready, resting, open and quiet, attending until the light dawns. Attending, not tending, receiving not transmitting, allowing not directing, this is a state rarely cultivated in our culture, yet one found in nature as hibernation. It is natural to have periods where one must lie fallow, drink in the dark, the silence, the rest.
Enlightening ourselves does not have to be something only imagined. Letting the light dawn in a chosen darkness is precisely an awakening available to each of us whenever we choose it. I can call on the darkness or welcome the dark I find myself in but I can’t know the depth or quality of my own darkness until I let it “enlighten" me. The light is the awareness, the recognition of my own heart, the sun inside me.
So next week after a few days meditating with others, I will enter three days of attending, incubating, here in my home. I will shut off the lights, turn off the devices and allow my body to rest and receive the short days and long nights before the Winter Solstice here in the Northern hemisphere. There will be no phone, no computer, no lighted screens. There will be little if any food and no noise other than the sound of the elements and the silence. I welcome you to join me, to revel in the dark, whether it be a darkness of the year, a darkness of the soul, or chosen respite. I wish for you as I wish for myself, to find your own light, to begin to attend to that light, nurture that light with your attention and wonder, reclaiming your own universe, the one with both light and dark, with sun and moon, earth and sky.
* Quote from In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley