A Sunday Short: Aug 27
When can you best see light?
At night, right? When it’s dark.
In fact, when it is the darkest.
After all, all professional astronomers, or all amateur astronomers, or all budding astronomers will tell you in order to see best the night time sky, with all the accessible stars and planets and constellations and satellites and comets and meteors and galaxies available to our tiny, corneal lenses, you must remove yourself from as much light as you can, spend solid minutes “in the dark” so that your eyes “dark adjust,” and then look up. To see the light.
We falsely believe beauty is found in daylight, under lights, in perfection, where colors shine at their most vibrant. But deep and awe-inspiring beauty is found as well…in the dark.
This is a bonus post, I know. Unexpected. But remember when I wrote that my life is opening up to synchronistic moments of awe and wonder and opportunity and growth? One of those moments just occurred for me.
So I’ll make this short.
I wrote a couple weeks ago, in the introduction to New Teachers, New Learning (a new miniseries of posts under the Alchemy of a Journey blog umbrella), that I have four new teachers in my life. Make that five now!
I was just introduced to Barbara Brown Taylor—an author, professor, and Episcopal priest. So I’ve ordered a few of her books—and I’m looking forward to learning from her. Because among the things that drew me to her, was this from my yesterday’s Daily Good feed (another part of my morning ritual):
Taylor has become increasingly uncomfortable with our tendency to associate all that is good with lightness and all that is evil and dangerous with darkness. Doesn’t God work in the nighttime as well? In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor asks us to put aside our fears and anxieties and to explore all that God has to teach us “in the dark.” She argues that we need to move away from our “solar spirituality” and ease our way into appreciating “lunar spirituality” (since, like the moon, our experience of the light waxes and wanes). Through darkness we find courage, we understand the world in new ways, and we feel God’s presence around us, guiding us through things seen and unseen. Often, it is while we are in the dark that we grow the most.
(From Taylor’s book “Learning to Walk in the Dark”)
Compelling right?
I’ve always been drawn to the night, to the dark. Allow me to paint my perfect day, and it will include dark, overcast, stormy skies, preferably at a beach next to the ocean, with a warm fire ready to comfort, along with Ludovico Einaudi or Brian Eno streaming from Pandora, as the darkness of night envelopes the world in its stillness.
The brain and mind function best in the light—that is, after-all, where we process light and light’s energy: aka color. But the heart? Oh…the heart….
The heart works its magic always in the dark. THAT’s also where you find Soul.
So I guess I should have said: “Allow me to paint my perfect moment, my perfect darkness, my perfect night.”
I’d paint a heart at home in the darkness.
Weirdly…no, synchronistically, the following was written August 18th.
when night begins
when night begins
and darkness holds sway,
other things too
begin.
color.
color begins to dim
toward grey,
then black.
noise.
noise begins to fade
toward silence,
then memory.
space.
space begins to shrink
toward closeness,
then only right here.
day-dwellers.
day-dwellers begin to rest
toward rest,
then sleep.
the world…
the world itself begins to slow
toward stillness,
then closure.
but my heart…
my heart begins to open.
when night begins
and darkness holds sway,
my heart begins to open
toward love,
then love.
my heart begins to open…
to love.
my heart
begins…
May your Sunday, and the coming week, be everything you intend. And may your nights bring you closer to Soul.
Always and Ubuntu,
~ kert
🙏🏼
PS: Click here if you are interested in the OnBeing, Krista Tippett interview with Barbara Brown Taylor.