Linger in the Darkness

“Darkness is one of our closest companions. It can never really surprise us; something within us knows the darkness more deeply than it knows the light. The dark is older than light. In the beginning was the darkness. The first light was born out of the dark….We forget so easily that all our feelings, thoughts, and brightness of mind are born in darkness. Thoughts are sparks of illumination within the dark silence and stillness of our bodies. We have an inner kinship with the darkness that nothing can dissolve.”

John O’Donohue, Eternal Echoes, pp. 144-145

And so we sit here on the other side of the precipice of the winter solstice with us beginning in and surrounded in darkness. Those here in the west in the northern hemisphere, including past versions of myself, would be emphasizing the return of the light to our world in our discussion of the solstice season. Doubtless, many would be projecting themselves forward into the expanding light some months forward in time. Yet, this me that greets you through these words wants to linger in the dark for a while longer. I’m not quite ready to give in to our culture’s insistence on the return of the light. It feels like the grand spiritual bypass that we are all sold from a young age that entreats us to treat the darkness as an enemy, as evil. However, anyone walking an animist path nested within any culture will tell you that this approaching darkness in such a reductive way is a bunch of nonsense.

Honestly, I just feel like I had reached this nadir point in the darkness when the solstice arrived. All the typical environmental markers of the darkness have come on like a rush recently. My great English Oak that I visit just lost its leaves within the last couple weeks. We received our annual blast of subzero temperatures. I am shoveling snow multiple times a week. I am riding my bike in the dark if I am picking up Juniper if the snow is clear. I don’t come to the darkness through a stark doorway of an established calender. No, I feel my way to it and don’t really fancy being called back to the light too soon. No, I just got to my darkness party and I am staying.

I’m ready to cast aside the light until it’s strength stirs the dark soils of my own plant kin with life again. I’m not interested in prematurely moving out of this season of darkness with my own spiritual practice. No, I want to let the utter desolation of the darkness wrap me in its cocooning embrace and invite me into my own interiority. I want the soil to invite my soul back into relationship with light again sometime far from now. I want the first buds on the trees some many months from now to be a marker that the light is quickening. I want the cold, soaking rains of spring, so many days away, to be the harbringer of the heat that is on the doorstep. For until the sun sears my face with that first spring heat, I will go inward and ignore others shrieking discomfort with the darkness. 

My embrace of the darkness is theatrical for a reason. I choose to meet the two-bit theatre performance of my contemporaries of the light with an equal spectacle of darkness as a spiritual movement unto itself.  I live in a time and place suffused with the most obnoxious calls to worship religious and cultural ideals that are not mine. It’s enough to make me hiss and snarl with disgust. I am not interested in recasting a historical Jesus back into an endless cascade of stories to meet the needs of empire or those who wish to poke at the empire from within its halls. Let the poor man rest for christ’s sake. I am not interested in making my labor that keeps a roof over my head and food on my plate being anything more than a means for survival in a broken time. Yet, in these times, if we aren’t doing what we love and worshiping the light of the world, we are considered some form of degenerate outsider. 

This annual insistence on return to the light prematurely is one reason why I hate the season of christmas in the US so much. We are told to be merry, have joy, and celebrate “his” birth. This season was never anything but a barren wasteland to me and I resent being forced into its rhythms. I remember with disdain the forced holiday celebrations with a side of the family I have now emancipated from. I remember the protecting of my own kin from godly people on that side of my family. I remember the theatre of kinship I maintained for years with these people to keep the peace while feeling such a feeling of dis-ease. It was there in the midst of lifeless prayers of love and light that I came to intimately understand the spiritual emptiness of christianity and its gospel of light. Ain’t no body gonna tell me any different or convince me that there is anything worth saving from this season. All we celebrating now is the clearing away of EVERYTHING and the emergence of a permafrost of silence.

I suppose I am comfortable with that now, the whole outsider status. You don’t get too popular nowadays speaking from a place of darkness unless you got some tonic for the dark you are hocking or silver lining story you can sell folx to show them the light is just beyond the darkness. The problem is sometimes there is just darkness with no silver lining or lesson to be learned. Sometimes you have to cut people out of your life. Sometimes people die in extremely unfair and horrible circumstances. Sometimes terrible things happen to you and you retreat back to the dark to heal. That is your right. You don’t have to take on someone else’s garbage as they yearn for you to glean out the light from the void of what you experience as dramatic nothingness or desolation. 

I can vividly remember in my teens an older friend of mine who lost his father imploring me to keep ties with my own father. I still hear the vague threats he made to me, telling me of the future regret that I would feel. However, he was speaking of a man, my own father, he considered a father figure in his life. Somehow that man rarely was the same father figure to me. I was always left trying to earn the attention of that father. I could hear him projecting his own loss onto me based on his yearning for his own father to still be alive. They are the sort of words that echo in my life today some 20 years later. Regardless, these are the words from a man who is putting his own garbage onto a kid who just wants someone out of his life. These are the words of a disciple of the light who just won’t let a kid be in the darkness of emancipating from a family member who does not serve them any longer. 

I am sure I am not alone in this experience. The insistence on basking in the light of illumination takes so many forms nowadays. “But they are in a better place.” “But they did not intend it that way.” “But you came out stronger because of it.” “But you learned something.” The many curt phrases of certitude that comes from a society of individuals that cannot just sit with the desolation of climate collapse, oppression, death, and all manner of other forms of suffering. Yes, all those things are awful and unbearable. Yet, why do we think that we must be through and done with a death and a rebirth in 3 days time? Sure, that’s what the great stories of many cultures say, such as the mystical carpenter who rose again on the third day. But it can take much longer than that wading through the darkness before one’s eyes can see clearly enough to make sense of it’s terrain. 

That has certainly my own experience with my obsessive compulsive disorder. For over a decade, I wandered around, living in fear of my own minds power to conjure up thoughts that terrified me. I would spin around and around trying to prove or disprove my own personal hellscapes I created in my head for hours, sometimes days. I am as the best of heroes and the worst of villains in those stories. There was no enlightenment in OCD; just endless looping mind snares. Even after going through exposure therapy years ago, wherein you face all the fears of the hellscapes you create in your head, I still experience the darkness that OCD brings to my life. Its a daily companion that plays a role in my life no matter how regular I am with my medication, my therapy sessions, and my tools. No matter what you make yourself suffer through, there is no end to the desolation of loss, Illness, mental health troubles, or deprivation. You cannot bypass the darkness; it comes for all of us and invites us to be with it without a stated endpoint. 

One can become more comfortable in the darkness. I feel much more comfortable there now than I used to. Experiencing loss, an absent father, social class barriers, and dealing with mental health issues make you kin with the darkness. In such a case, darkness is no longer the flat dimension of suffering and evil that our society characterizes it as.  No, travel the dark path long enough and it unveils its mysterious, nutritive qualities and tools. One can conceal themselves quite easily in the dark. One can rest and heal quite easily in the dark. One can ride the wave of sacred imbas forosnai that all great seers in my lineage have traveled before me to explore sacred mysteries in the dark. One can travel across otherworldly thresholds in the dark. One can behold death clearly and hold the reality that this day may be the one they die (as any day could be). Hark, behold the darkness

You can understand my reticence to leave the comfort of my dark domain. I want nothing of the cult of light at Amazon HQ hiding the death of a human being by surrounding a corpse in boxes to ensure productivity levels remain the same. I want nothing of the cult of light’s insistence on consuming time, materials, and dreams to continue to grow. I do not want to live in an illusory reality. No, I want to live in a reality where time is understood as an imperial illusion, capitalism is considered organized crime, and decay is the ideal. So, please let me take my leave to linger still in the darkness. Let me recede from those clinging onto the old world and find solace in the nurturing darkness. For I am entropy embodied, shadow given form, and I cannot turn from my ultimate fate to become soil once again, darkness incarnate.

This is the tenor of my dreams for myself these days. I entreat myself to ask different questions of myself, questions that come from a place of darkness. How might I decay into a being that is the antithesis of the meglomaniacs that inhabit our culture? How might I bring death into my life more fully and be of service to the great power of entropy that we all finally succumb to? How can I be of service to the great unraveling that I am witnessing before my eyes? How may I sit amidst the great mysteries and not request any return from them? These are the dreams of a dark hermit of the hedge. These are the dreams of a man who was thrown out into the intellectual alley long ago. No one comes knocking for the counsel of a self-professed heretic and hermit. He can’t be found. He exists in the eternal winter that our society refuses to believe exists. Yet, he still can entertain his own little fancies in the piece and quiet of the snow drifts.

Hark, hear the good word of the darkness. May we invite the benevolent gospel of decrepit, oozing decay into our lives. May we sit in the ruins of the factories of the great logistics behemoths pondering the futility of monopoly. May we repose in a leather recliners in the steel husks where titans of finance once plied their trade considering the destructive power of our own creations. May we sit outside time, outside the capital that seeks to colonize our time, in a damp bog and let moss overtake our corporeal form one century at a time. In that, may we relent to our final form as a marker of time, of memory and not of potential to be fulfilled. This, dear reader, is the good news I share from my shadowed solitude this fine day.

Be well,

James

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