Out of the Darkness
Freeport, December 20, 2020
Tomorrow at 5:02 AM, Winter Solstice, the darkest point of the year, will be reached. At that moment, the planet will be balanced on a fulcrum between light and dark. By the next hour, the next day, we will have moved off the point where light and dark are equal, and light will begin her steady crawl into the sky. In three months, we will be halfway to long summer light-filled evenings.
After we moved three years ago from our busy corner at Porters Landing, a spot by the sea whose past as an important intersection of shipbuilding and commerce still hummed its rhythms into the present, to the middle of the last uninhabited forest in Freeport, it was the depth of the night darkness that startled me. Here, there are no streetlights, nor lights from house windows. No car ever passes this way. In the sky there is no brightening glow from distant towns. The built world slips away, silence descends.
There is in this darkness an emptiness that holds no expectations, no story line or direction, only the quiet thrum of our heartbeats, of existence. There is an immediacy to an early dinner with Bob looking out the black windows, to reading together in our chairs after dinner, to early bedtime and warm snuggles in a cold bedroom.
Before 2020, I found this emptiness within the darkness vastly comforting and looked forward each year to the steady disappearance of light. When spring finally arrived and the light came back, I felt renewed and open to possibilities, to new shoots of life.
But this year, when late fall arrived, a different kind of darkness invaded my private world. The news of the day presented itself in many different forms: in a text on my phone, in an email, in phone calls with clients and friends, in news alerts of the rising number of Covid deaths (today we are at 314,0000 and counting). The dark world outside pierced the black windows, seeped under the doors, disturbed my sleep.
Last week’s post was filled with the griefs of this dark moment. So, it was startling and comforting when J., a friend and colleague who is a serious practitioner and student of Buddhism, replied to my post with her typical quiet wisdom. She offered the light filled possibility of change that is feasible after letting go. The timing of the arrival of her wisdom, here at the end of the year as we turn towards the light, is perfect!
“Lots to grieve; lots of needed goodbyes. Absolutely! And yet, what if much of what we need to say goodbye to is welcome, and perhaps overdue. Goodbye to systemic racism, to planet abuse, to blatant inequities, or, to over-consumption, to gun violence, to ‘othering’, to.... The list could get pretty long. I’m not sure getting “back to normal” is where we need to be headed; how about a refiguring of our own values?”
Can you see the light shining through these sentences? Can you see the turning in this?
As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote: “the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born, now is the time of monsters.” Seen through this lens, the conflict of the last four years represents the great war between holding on to the old world, to the old stories about who we are and how the cosmos works and our place in it and “letting go”, accepting the new reality, the new, humbling story about who we human creatures are and what we must do to survive in the universe.
I am not a student of systemic change, but I am a student of human change. For fifty years people have walked into my office in search of change, though perhaps all they knew is that they wanted the pain to stop. No one came to see me when their lives were absent of monsters. They came at a moment of reckoning. Many came in the grip of a great depression which, like this moment, filled their lives with darkness. I came to see myself as a maker of stories. Together we assembled pieces of the old story: of perhaps feeling one needs to be a great shining success in order to be loved and cared for. In the old story, there is always a moment when the old plot no longer works, when success is elusive or damns the person on the other side of the desk to loneliness. There may have been years of this before he or she knocks on my door. Together we “reconfigure old values.” Perhaps, it is more important to be connected to people, to care about them and be cared for, and perhaps the way to do this is by being vulnerable and empathic instead of stoic and disconnected?
Will the terrible pain of this pandemic and its erasure of everything “normal” have the consequence of leaving us open to telling new stories about ourselves we would not have been capable of accepting before this crisis? Will we be so practiced at letting go that when the light finally comes back, we will see everything differently and rearrange ourselves in different ways? Is this moment a great opportunity for change, for what Johanna Macey calls The Great Turning?
The light is coming. It is time to tell new stories. I am listening. At high tide tomorrow afternoon, my friend T. and I are going to strip down to our bathing suits and run giggling and screeching into the sea. We are going to come out of the freezing ocean all atingle, gasping with life and possibility.