Darkness and Light

Here is my secret. A very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Darkness. Most of us fear it. We’re conditioned to this fear. Scary things can hide and linger in the dark. Nowadays we can hardly even find physical darkness; our electronics shine their presence with bright dots of light or numbers. Even smoke alarms beam their presence known. Unless one ventures out into the wilderness on a moonless night, or into a cave perhaps, it isn’t easy to even experience being immersed in true darkness. We’ve nearly eliminated physical darkness in most of our day to day lives. We have become masters of distraction, doing our best to avoid any dark or uncomfortable thoughts, limiting as best we can any mental darkness. And darker emotions are often medicated, whether medically or in any of the many ways available to us (alcohol being the one I’m most familiar with. . .).

I’ve wondered, though, whether this cultural repugnance of the dark has inadvertently limited our ability to experience the light. Not so much in a physical sense, because thankfully our sun rises each day, beaming its brightness. But are we comfortable resting in our own joy, gratitude, wonder and awe? To what degree can we greet the day with openness and optimism? Even as I write these words, I recognize how naïve they sound. The “but” that hangs there, pointing to all the problems surrounding us.

And yet. . . is there a way that we can – without minimizing or ignoring the dark happenings – retain a recognition of the beauty and light that’s available to us? Can we widen our aperture to take in more?

This limited perception can happen in how we hold our past experiences and the people in our lives. Sometimes a person in our memory becomes almost a caricature of themselves, a snapshot of their worst behaviors or habits. I noticed this recently when talking about my ancestors. Instead of seeing the wholeness of my grandparents, for example, I found almost a shorthand happening, as if a life could be encapsulated into one dark snapshot. Initially, expanding the perspective can feel achy, like waking up a numb limb. Any habitual protection around our tender hearts has to be expanded to let in more of the persons wholeness, more of their light that was necessarily present, even if hidden behind less-than positive stories. So instead of seeing “alcoholic”, maybe there’s room to see the adventurous spirit? Any hint of honoring our ancestors and having gratitude for their role in making this lifetime possible can shift something in a subtle yet powerful way. Same is true for the way we hold our memories; allowing them to be fluid instead of stagnant can create greater ease. Honoring all that has been, for their gifts, can shift the way we walk in the world.

In a recent shamanic journey for myself, to explore a heaviness I had been experiencing, I found a dark swirl of energy, like a tornado of heavy darkness representing an unhelpful pattern in my life. I was able to sit with the image, watch it move and morph and, over time, I realized that, at its core, was a bright, golden, loving light. This “bad” habit that had created what I was experiencing negatively had originally been sourced by loving intentions. Knowing this helped me to soften around it.

Darkness and light. Maybe there’s more to experience beyond their polarities. Maybe our hearts can “see rightly” so that greater truths can be revealed.