Oh Joy! More Light

This morning, at 5:30 AM Seattle time, the winter solstice arrived. For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been honoring the solstice. We have built many monuments all over the earth to honor this return of the light, one of the most fascinating examples being Stonehenge in England.  Winter Solstice is a time when the days start getting longer and the nights shorter. Although most people celebrate the return of the light, I am inviting you to also honor the darkness that has come into your life during this challenging year where our lives went topsy-turvy.

How do we do this? First by realizing that in the moment you are sitting here, reading this blog, dew drops are reflecting the morning light; a rainbow of colors is appearing out of the heart of flowers; whales are singing their ancient tunes; babies who were just one seed nine months ago are taking their first breath; and wind is caressing ancient bristlecone pines high in the alpine forests. All around us is a magical realm—earth, air, sun and water being woven over and over again into myriad amazingly beautiful forms.

Now notice where your awareness has been primarily focused for the last 24 hours. Have you been present for this wondrous unfolding? Probably not. If you are like most people, your attention has probably been focused on your own individual struggles—big ones, little ones, scary ones and fun ones.  If you watch what you are doing all day long, you can begin to see that you are usually working at life.  You, like all of us, are oriented towards struggle, lost in doing life rather than being life.

The image I often use is that we are like children completely focused on trying to unravel a ball of yarn, and all the while we are standing in paradise. We are so busy with our struggles that we are not here for life. Beyond this narrow focus is a reality—a safe, benevolent, trustable, magical and fascinating reality—that is always with us no matter where we are and no matter what is happening. But we don’t notice.

One of the primary reasons we don’t notice is that we fear all levels of pain —physical, emotional and mental. In this fear we have become addicted to the endless struggle of trying to get rid of what we don’t like in our lives and to go towards what we do. We can see this in our commercials (if you ate too much, just drink this antacid and you’ll be able to ignore the message in your discomfort and overeat again); it is evident in our religions (salvation is going to the light and leaving the dark behind); in our whole response to the aging process (the dramatic increase in plastic surgery, the billions of dollars spent on potions and lotions); and in our denial of death (the warehousing of the elderly and the sanitation of the dying process).

We want one side of life (the pleasant) without the other (the unpleasant) and wonder why we are lost in struggle most of the time. “Don’t respond to the pain in your life; just go towards the pleasant and the desirable and leave the rest behind” is our litany. If that doesn’t work, we deny, blame and manipulate, absolutely certain that if life is difficult, then something is wrong. This is broadcast from pulpits, politicians, therapists and especially ourselves.

In the belief that there is such a thing as a perfect and together human being, we have maimed, brutalized and tried to exorcise the vulnerable and imperfect parts of ourselves. We struggle with what we don’t like about our bodies, our minds, our emotions, our relationships, our communities and our world. We are conquerors, addicted to the belief that if we can manage life by ignoring, denying, fixing or getting rid of what we don’t like, then we will know lasting peace.

This approach denies that pain is a thread in the tapestry of life and has an essential role in the scheme of things. It is as if we decided that the tide coming in is good and the tide going out is bad, completely ignoring the fact that it wouldn’t work if the tide always came in. The land would flood, crops would die, and we’d have wet feet all the time! We fail to see that when the tide goes out, it then gathers up wonderful gifts from the sea—beautiful shells, water carved logs, rich communities of sea weed—and on its return, it deposits them on the shore.

If the tide of our physical, emotional and spiritual lives always came in, we would be stagnant creatures.  Every single time our tide goes out, we are renewed and enriched by all the gifts it brings as it flows back in. Because of our refusal to see the essential nature of darkness and all of the gifts that it brings, we are caught off guard when the tide has gone out in our lives (as it is destined to do). We then look desperately for something or someone (oftentimes ourselves) to blame. “Don’t trust the ebb and flow of life; don’t listen to the pain and what it is feeding back to you; just get rid of it,” is the credo we live by.

We can learn how to work with our pain in new ways, understanding that it is an integral part of life. We need to learn how to include it rather than exclude it. To awaken our hearts so that we can heal, we recognize that each of us is destined to take on challenges in our lives, get lost in them and then finally bring them to the light of compassionate awareness. As John Lee said in Writing From The Body, “Letting the shadow speak its peace is part of the process that leads us to the good stuff. If we can’t let ourselves go deeply into the shadow, we may never reach the place in ourselves where tenderness resides.”

Freedom comes when we learn to respond rather than react to the difficult in our lives. Whether it is a deeply challenged body, a broken heart, an abusive boss, deep rage, freezing cold, an overdue deadline or a dying friend, we can learn the power of relating to the difficult parts of our lives rather than being caught in their web. Pain then becomes an awakener, an ally and even a friend. As Stephen Levine has said, “Pain sucks, but it grabs our attention.” That which is difficult in our lives is here to heal us, and our job is to learn how to pay attention.

So, I am inviting you to think about the core challenges you have experienced this year and ask life to show you what gifts they are bringing. Even when darkness takes you into realms of deep despair, trust the darkness because great treasures are always nestled in the dark.

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