“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” — T.S. Eliot.
Thank God for the Christmas lights. You leave for work. It’s dark. You come home. It’s dark.
I’ve been leaning into the darkness a lot lately. I’ve been in college less than a year, but it feels like two. The feeling of not understanding something is my least favorite feeling in the world. Like I’m not good enough. Like hiding in the woods alone and facing my parents’ wrath at report card time is easier than not understanding.
But not understanding is what it takes to understand. There’s no way out but through. It’s really, really dark in that tunnel. As dark as a tomb. As dark as a womb.
In the southern hemisphere, the Milky Way can stretch from horizon to horizon. Ancient people in the south saw constellations in the stars, and they also saw dark constellations, creatures that inhabited the dark middle of the galaxy. If my parents had lived high in the Andes, I would have been born under the sign of the llama, an animal with great stamina and patience. No pressure.
It turns out the dark places are where all the action is. Half of the world’s great telescopes are high in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where the Inka built their own observatories. Now, vast radio arrays peer into those dark dust clouds in the center of the galaxy because we’ve discovered they are the alluvial soil of the universe. The dust collapses into stars and planets and maybe into creatures who will peer into the glass of a new stellar nursery where more of us might be born.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung.
This time of year in Ancient Rome, there was a festival called Saturnalia. They decorated with green branches and wreaths. They feasted and offered gifts to the gods and each other. They made and gave candles, symbols of light in a dark time. It was also a time for inversion, when masters served their slaves, and men and women crossdressed. I think it would been the perfect time to consider all the dark space between the stars. What if what is isn’t what is, but is what isn’t?
A year ago, I was a songwriter, teacher, and entertainer. During the pandemic, I went into the darkest place I’ve ever known, a mine shaft in my mind where I felt along the wall for a light switch or a door knob until I got tired and laid down. I asked for help, which is also not my favorite thing, and science helped me find the switch. It was up to me to come back out of the mine. When I did, I realized if I had a little help, someone to guide me, I could go back into the darkness and learn whatever it was trying to teach me.
So this is the time of year I turned my whole life inside-out and upside-down. I walked away from mastery and started over as an apprentice. I left the arts and stumbled into the sciences. But are they really that different? Isn’t a true master always learning? Recently, I met a neuroscientist who writes his research papers with a fountain pen “so that it is still an art.”
I’m learning how to learn. When I don’t understand, and I feel that terrible darkness rising up inside me, I remind myself that this is how it feels to learn, to grow, to die, and be born again like the sacrificial king. I remind myself that the darkness is fertile — that, in fact, I owe my planet to it.
What light will be born in the fertile loam of this dark night? Let’s go into it together. I know you can’t see me, but I’ll be right here. There are worlds to be discovered.
Making the Darkness Conscious