Easing into the dark, keeping the heart light
I’m celebrating summer, but I don’t want to forget about darkness.
I spent a week in the Catskill Mountains, which simultaneously felt like a lifetime and absolutely no time, at all. The unfamiliar has a way of rupturing one’s sense of time and reality, demanding the utmost presence.
The forest — with its vast hush and dense darkness— was a revelation for a Florida native raised in the suburbs, such as myself. It was a site of fear for me, at first. When I arrived at my mentor’s cabin in the woods, a thunderstorm had just passed through that evening, leaving the landscape damp, heavy and gray. She gave me a tour, pointing out that the three wishing wells, as she liked to call them, on the property had dried up. I avoided looking into the forest around us. What I couldn’t immediately make out in the trees, my mind automatically filled with stock imagery from horror movies, murder mysteries and folk stories about ghosts and cryptids. We caught up over wine in her kitchen, distracting me from the vague fear growing in my stomach.
My mentor left for the city, entrusting the cabin to her cat and me for a few days. I initially felt uneasy being alone. Where was the sun and its reassuring warmth? Most days it rained, adding a weight to the air. I had trouble sleeping for the first couple of nights. With the lights off, the darkness felt like a heavy cloak and the silence was loud. I felt shame around my fear, bordering on a sense of defeat. Without the familiar cacophony from around my apartment in Miami to lull me to sleep — the prideful bass pulsating from a car stereo, the laughter of neighbors, dogs barking, even the garish light of a street lamp flooding through my bathroom window — I felt myself stiffening against the dark, fearful of what I could not clearly perceive.
One night, I dreamt that there were spirits in my room. In this dream, my mentor offered to tell me the story about markings apparent on the wall behind my bed. I put my hand up to motion that I did not want to know. Despite my refusal, the spirits insisted that I listen and expressed that, above all, they wanted to be acknowledged. When I obliged, they became spritely children who seemed to have gotten lost in the woods. I gifted them flowers, told them I loved them, and sent them on their way. They waved goodbye as they skipped into the forest near the cabin. I woke up drenched in tears, though I felt a perceptible shift in the air and in my body, a lightness.
Was it a dream or something else? The experience certainly felt beyond me. I could, at the very least, accept that and be more present with my fear: the heaviness, the avoidance, the rigidity in my body and mind, all trying to protect me from the unknown. I realized that in automatically framing the forest as a threat, I had been centering my own comfort and need for control within a landscape that had existed long before I arrived.
Could a willingness to listen to, to acknowledge (as opposed to avoiding), what we fear restore a sense of presence in the darkness? And in being present here, could we come into better relationship with ourselves, others and our surroundings?
In this newfound lightness was a portal into the present, one in which I could better place myself within (not against) the forest. Here, I was not fearful, controlling or projecting. Instead, I eased into a state of listening, receiving and offering. I was reminded of Langston Kahn’s reflections on compassionate presence in his book Deep Liberation:
“To be able to engage with the stuck places inside of ourselves, we need to cultivate presence…at its core, presence is compassionate curiosity.…Ironically, it is when we see something stuck inside of us exactly as it is without trying to change it that it often naturally begins to shift. When we bring our compassionate presence to a part of ourselves that we have previously been in combative relationship with, it changes our relationship to that part of us and thus allows that part of us to begin to transform.”
The shift in perception, the lightness, I was experiencing also reminded me of this subtle, yet important difference referenced in Khalil Gibran’s passage “On Love,” from The Prophet:
When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
I found that in releasing the tension in my mind and body — the feeling of separation from my surroundings — I was able to take in the unfamiliar with a childlike sense of wonder. In acknowledging my fear and easing into the forest, the darkness, I could better tune in to the myriad poems of the present:
The water in the wishing wells returned, flowing and abundant after days of rain. The old radio in the kitchen playing a song that seemed to perfectly match, or even predict, my day. The lithe body of the chipmunk brought in by the cat resembling the softness of an old rose bloom. A deer waiting until I was close enough to see the glint of sunlight in her eye before prancing off into the trees. A supposed stranger coming into focus among a field of flowers and remembered through laughter, through touch.
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I’m not one for neat conclusions and am still very much revising/practicing my own relationship with the proverbial forest, but I invite us to continually reflect on the following without needing to have perfect answers:
When do you tense up in fear? What do you notice about this tension? What does it feel like in your body? Is it possible to shift the weight? What would it feel like to keep your eyes open in the dark? What would it feel like to ease into the unknown with an open heart? How might you cultivate a relationship with the unknown?
With gratitude,
Kristen
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