Search the darkness
Sit with your friends; don’t go back to sleep
Don’t sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.
Life’s water flows from darkness.
Search the darkness don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light, and you are, too;
don’t leave this companionship.
Be a wakeful candle in a golden dish,
don’t slip into the dirt like quick silver.
The moon appears for the night travelers,
be watchful when the moon is full.
Rumi
In the Northern hemisphere, darkness steps toward us seductively. Her long fingers stretch out to touch us, sliding across our cheekbones, slipping across our shoulders. Soon she will enfold us in her winter cloak. But even as the light glows wider for our kin in the South, we are all held in planetary, cosmic, evolutionary cycles and a pervasive darkness feels present even in the full beam of the sun. We are being asked so much right now beneath heavy influences - in exquisite and excruciating ways simultaneously - and we must continuously meet these requests one way or another - whether that's collapsing into bed, allowing a flower on our path to delight us, sobbing on the floor, calling upon a medicine, sitting in the unknown...
I have learned to savor the darkness, but for most of my life I was afraid. Night terrors were a steady feature of my childhood - so consistently ferocious I listened to audio books every night to fall asleep until high school. The immediate animal-body reaction I felt in my system with fading light was an impulse toward skin-prickling concern and heart-heavying loneliness. As I got older, as I began to pursue intensive inquiry of my inheritances, I realized my fear of darkness was lodged in my ancestral body, an inexplicable remembrance of what the night meant for my lineage. Constant fugitivity fleeing from pogroms, the exquisite truths of our faith forced deeper into the shadows for fear of death over millennia, Kristallnacht - the night of broken glass...
As I reflect upon the instability and un-rootedness embedded in my nervous system and externally manifesting in the physical plane for most of my life – my struggle to land, my yearning for real home, my desperation to belong – I'm connecting this present reality with hundreds, thousands of years of unrelenting dispossession and displacement. In the ancestral repair and reclamation course I'm facilitating, another Jewish person asked the group: "what's possible when we're not running?"
What's possible when the darkness no longer holds our worst memories? Our most desperate pleas for survival? Our most agonizing aches to reach safety by daybreak? I see so many of us living with this level of terror inside us even if in our material, present reality reveals otherwise. This is such a poignant opportunity to really drop into the present and take stock of what's true. And also, we can't continue to deny the embedded imprints shaping our perception, our relationship to life itself. Maybe it's pressed deep into our cells barely breaching the surface of our awareness, or maybe it's blaring with an explosive five-alarm fire, but ancient pain lives inside each of us.
I feel a pervasive lost-ness amongst the people I know, whether that's a lost-ness to self, to place, to family, to community. And I feel it in myself too.
Almost everyone I know is confronting a profound, somewhat unprecedented level of struggle related to place. Where to be? Where to root? Where to ground? These questions are haunting and insatiable when compounded by the insanity of current conditions – skyrocketing inflation and shocking levels of scarcity – products of devastating corporate greed and reckless resource hoarding. This economy, this politic, this society, these norms, these lifeways, these architectures – these are all ancestral legacies, intergenerational inheritances. What are we meant to see in this darkness? What illumination might we conjure to call upon their release through the light of awareness?
For me, community is continuously eroded by these old energies. The community farm insists upon surveillance infrastructure to keep out the unhoused. The community farm is actually owned by a family, cultivated on their own private lot, "volunteers" pick weeds and pay this family for the vegetables their very hands helped grow. The community farm is an instagram sensation, masquerading as "solar punk", an imperial impulse toward personal possession (with good branding and glossy filters).
We are entrenched in old, undying battles, biblical fights, of exclusion, rejection, abandonment, oppression, repression. Why haven't these been outmoded from the collective field? Why do they cling to us like hungry ghosts? Why are the mainstream ways of functioning in the world infused with predation, exploitation, extraction, objectification? Why would we build and consent to this repetitively?
In session 4 of cultivating culture I shared the questions that surfaced for me in my own ancestral excavation: how does hurt grow so diffuse it becomes a cultural characteristic and pain so vast that it becomes an entire politic?
The broadcast we're still hearing blasted resoundingly in the media, through culture, is a simple plotline: "blame the Jews", "blame the Blacks", "blame the gays", "blame the Muslims". The message that reverberates in every Hebrew school in America as we track the history of persecution against the peoples of this faith - chosen or inherited, white or Black, is "America took us in when no one else would, and we’re safe here, but only for so long."
What's possible when we're not running? An ancestral question echoes through the ages. And I wonder, who among us on this planet has known a life without this urge to flee? Every single one of us is impacted by the way humanity has shaped incarnation into a story of separation.
Kanye West was the richest Black man in America and consistently ranks among the richest rappers in the world, even with his Adidas and The Gap cuts. This man has everything he could possibly dream of, and clearly he is devastated. Is he getting the medical support he needs? Is he getting the therapeutic support he deserves? Has he fully grieved his mother's death that hangs upon him so visibly? How is his sleep? What does darkness mean to him?
A dear friend spent a day at Burning Man with one of the Google co-founders, Sergey Brin. The man snapped his fingers and every obscure request was granted, and she said he essentially sat in a somber pool of grief the entire day, ingesting one dissociative after another. Both of these men went through excruciating divorces of their own making -- unfeeling, untending, uncaring for their partners. What is the terror in their hearts that they must make it hard for others to live? At the core of all violence is pain. Internalized, unprocessed, unresolved pain. If we can't address this in ourselves, we drop bombs on others. Whether it's an individual, a school, or a nation.
Accountability to ourselves and each other to be with the hurt and the pain, to be held in and by community – this is my prayer. I refuse to pedestalize these avatars. I insist upon seeing them as humans. My question is increasingly: how are we finding our way back together? Because we need each other. We need community. We need the village. If we're going to melt down, may we melt into the arms of our neighbors.
When we slow down long enough, when our heart rate softens, when our eyes open and our ears widen and our skin shivers with information arriving to us beyond this culture of eternal spotlights... darkness becomes an invitation into remembrance of who we are at the deep, deep, deep core of ourselves. When I dream of nourishing darkness, I see my ancestors gathered around the fire sharing story and song uninhibited, unafraid of who might dispossess them from this sacred place of refuge. I remember:
"Life’s water flows from darkness.
Search the darkness don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light, and you are, too;
don’t leave this companionship."
The converging, cascading pandemics of this time are night travelers too, holding the candle, asking us to search, lifting every veil of illusion, plunging us into the deepest shadow, calling us toward unforgetting, allowing none of us to emerge unscathed.
We might say these are dark times. We might say these are the times when this darkness cradles us to search for the ways we'll release thousands of years of stored pain in our bodies. We might say these are the times when we see the darkness in another differently -- not as an excuse to ostracize them, but as a way to bring them in close and say, "what hurts?" and "what do you need?" because none of us are alone in this pain, all of us share this darkness. And maybe it exists in equal measure to the amount we need to open our hearts wide wide wide to the humanity of our world. Could the darkness soften with the dilation of our hearts?
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Damn that was powerful. And the artwork. Obsessed with all of it.