The Light In the Dark

In a few days, we will be celebrating the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year. Even though we will begin experiencing increasingly more daylight after December 21^st, it can feel like the darkness on our planet is intensifying and the light diminishing. This can evoke fear if we don’t understand the fertility of the dark.

A way to get straight to the truth that darkness may not be something to be afraid of is to look at manure! Here is a substance that we deem has a high ‘yuck ‘factor and doesn’t smell so good. And yet when you till it into the earth, it grows beautiful flowers.

The same is true in our lives. The dark times, the times when the challenges feel unmeetable, are not here because you have done something wrong or God fell asleep on the job. Your challenges may feel like shit, but they are really fertilizer for your growth. Just as deep in the darkness of the earth are diamonds, rubies and emeralds, your darkest challenges come with gems of truth hidden within them.

Manitoba medicine woman Agnes Whistling Elk once said, “If you look at something carefully, you will always be able to see its dark side. One cannot exist without the other.  And yet we choose never to look into the shadows.  Understand that it is what you choose not to observe in your life that controls your life. Everything begins with a circle of motion, without the positive and negative poles there would be no movement, no creation.  Without the dark side your beauty would not exist.  Don’t be afraid to look at both sides.  You need them both.  You must honor all as part of the Great Spirit.”

As you celebrate the longest night on December 21, I invite you also to honor the fertility of the dark times in your life.  You, like everybody else, have had your heart broken, have had moments where you wanted to die, have been woken up in the middle of the night in great despair. And you, like everybody else, will one day show up on your death bed. Before that day, I invite you to befriend the difficult times so that rather than always trying to chase happiness, you discover the joy of showing up for life, all of it.

The wonderful thing is, as you discover how to ride the waves of life rather than continually grasping or resisting, you become a healing presence in the world. If you can trust the darkness in your life, then you can trust it around what’s happening on our planet. Rather than falling into fear or despair, you can hold the vision of the healing that is asking to come out of this seemingly shitty time.

I leave you with one of my favorite Wendell Berry quotes:

In the darkness of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

Even though the hillside is rocky right now, will you sow clover with me?