The darkness isn’t all scars and trauma
Is it friend?
And hidden selves and “shadow work”,
The darkness is just us
It is the darkness of the womb
The darkness of our skin
Or our foremother’s skin
The shrouding quiet of shadow
How we sleep
It’s the soil
It’s the moon
The quiet blanket of night
it’s the cosmos
It’s not just a place we go to serve
a healing narrative
It’s a place we are
Always
It’s our being
It’s the middle of our heart
It’s beautiful
It’s beyond polarity ideas
And good and evil idiocy
it’s the warp and weft of everything
The woven and weaving
It’s two cupped hands over my eyes darkness and a grin on my face
The darkness is beautiful
Not because it shows the stars
because it is the stars and the stars are it
it is the land on earth
and the land in space
where ancestors dwell
The sister or brother to the light
The connective tissue
and the organs of cosmos
and home
it is every cell
and every memory
it is the base state of the universe
from which all beings are born
In a world that worships the intellect, and the material, and the light of knowledge and the light of divinity, while shunning the dark, or treating it like as a place to fear, or extract healing from, that for centuries has treated the body and the earth as something to be transcended, to rise above, to go to the earth only to take, collapsing ecosystems and filing ocean with chemicals; fearing death and putting it at bay – in this world such an obsession with light, may be vastly more terrifying than anything the imagined dark could spit out. If we want to connect with nature, with the living animistic world, then we need to understand and respect our darkness, as much as our light.
Pictured the roots of Japanese Cedar 杉 Sugi on Kurama Yama 鞍馬山, the great sacred mountain in Kyōto Prefecture 京都府 who birthed the Japanese Art of Reiki and held its founder Usui Mikao during his 21 day mountain practice