Turning Towards Darkness

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are. ~ Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)

Winter has always been a difficult time for me. It feels as if the darkness creeps inside, insinuating itself in my patterns of thought, shrouding my typically clear-sighted and optimistic perspective. Perhaps this is why I lean so heavily toward the light – rejoicing in the full moon; savoring the slow, glorious ascent of the sun; sparking the candles on my meditation altar into flame. My eyes linger on the dew clinging to the grass at my sit spot beside Richardson Bay, thousands of glittering diamonds of sunlight. I marvel how the Bay itself turns its green face upward, basking in the millions of yellow light particles of yellow both infusing and radiating from it. I sit bayside, watch the sky dance across the spectrum from deep indigo, to light purply blue, to azure, to cotton candy blue lightened by sunlight. My spirit mirrors its lightening. I feel ready to greet another day.

Yet even on these sunlit, blue-sky winter days, there’s still a small lump in my throat,  heaviness in my spirit. Some old grief keeps company with me. Perhaps you can relate? For me, it’s linked to my current state of profound unknowing about my future, with its attendant confusion, uncertainty, and fearfulness. It’s prompted, too, by disheartening evidence of entrenched, devastating societal racism; widening economic inequality; drought and other damaging repercussions of climate change; and a global environment characterized overwhelmingly by divisiveness, violence, cowardice, and greed. Lodged in between these personal and planetary woes are the tribulations faced by loved ones:  my dear friend slowly being consumed by cancer; my neighbor, an overwhelmed nonprofit Director, who’s working herself to a pulp; my little brother, digging out of debt and struggling to provide for his family of four; my parents, navigating the complicated effects and decisions of old age. At times, the darkness paralyzes me in the headlights, all bewilderment and fear. It threatens to overtake me completely. I feel my heart thrumming beneath my skin, my mouth dry and jaw set, the hair on my neck standing on end. I’m inclined to run – but to where?

Years of meditation practice are helping me to see and greet the darkness for what it is: a wise old friend. I’m learning to turn toward, rather than run from, the sorrow, the fear, the confusion, the disappointment and anger. I’m striving to practice in my life what I do each time I sit to meditate:  to acknowledge and be with what is. Thursday evening, I observed the five o’clock sun cast its soft light on a deep green stand of hundred-foot eucalyptus trees, its rays reflecting off their slender trunks, turning them to silver. The spectacle was made more magical for its backdrop of slate gray rainclouds. Ponderous and threatening though they were, I saw them also as the containers of desperately needed rain, essential contributors to the spring planting season, harbingers of the summer and fall harvests. The slightly chaotic pre-storm weather also brought a Black-crowned Night Heron out to roost on the railing of a skipjack in the harbor:  regal, stoic, introspective, unruffled by rising wind and falling temperature.

So, too, the darkness within and around us – including the solitary darkness in which we immerse ourselves in meditation – holds invaluable riches. From this deep dark well of emotion I connect with an unbounded spaciousness, a limitless and all-pervasive reservoir of love. It both enfolds and inhabits me. When I drop fully into this well of love, I grow in empathy with all who hurt, who struggle, who feel abandonment or shame or deep sadness. I rediscover, to quote civil rights activist Vincent Harding, that:

"We are not alone in this struggle for the re-creation of our own lives and the life of our community. It has long been written and known that those who choose to struggle for the life of the earth and its beings are part of an ageless, pulsating membrane of light that is filled with the lives, hopes, and beatific visions of all who have fought on, held on, loved well, and gone on before us. For this task is too magnificent to be carried by us alone, in our house, in our meeting, in our organization, in our generation, in our lifetime... we are all a part of one another, and we are all part of the intention of the great creator spirit to continue being light and life."

In meditation, we are invited to transcend the darkness by connecting with the selfsame strength characterized by the Holy Trinity:  the gift of a human life; the vastness of our capacity to give and receive love; and the intuitive knowledge of “more-ness” – the certain knowing that we are so, so much more than our thinking, fretting, obsessing small minds. The simple act of uniting body, mind, and breath in space and time is all I need to transform suffering into peace, turn darkness into light. For me, companionship on the journey and these nuggets of truth provide powerful motivations to practice.

The poet Mark Strand’s Lines For Winter echo this encouragement to be with what is, to lean into the darkness so far that we burst through to the other side – to self-acceptance, empathy, and an ever-growing tenderness that we might offer our troubled world and its inhabitants.

Tell yourself

as it gets cold

and gray falls from the air

that you will go on

walking, hearing

the same tune no matter where

you find yourself --

inside the dome of dark

or under the cracking white

of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.

Tonight as it gets cold

tell yourself

what you know which is nothing

but the tune your bones play

as you keep going.

And you will be able

for once to lie down

under the small fire

of winter stars.

And if it happens that you cannot

go on or turn back and you find yourself

where you will be at the end,

tell yourself

in that final flowing of cold through your limbs

that you love what you are.

~ Mark Strand  ~