Happy winter solstice! Happy peak of night in the year’s rhythm! There’s no better moment to open up one of my personal favorite topics: darkness. This piece is deliberately unbalanced (more dark than light), so we can give darkness her time to shine.
Trigger warning, this post contains mention of suicide, is highly personal, & probably missing many caveats that could quickly turn this essay into a book of caveats.
Also, I wrote this while listening to my friend Victor’s moody cinematic playlist, highly recommend it as a reading companion.
Queendom of Darkness
I was talking with a friend about mold poisoning (which I’ve been challenged with on & off for the past few years, now more off than on). He prompted- “can you describe to me how it feels?”
I defined it as a portal of darkness, where the exit disappears for an undetermined period of time. Hours, days, when I was really in it, months…the kind of winter that relentlessly snows & fogs you in. The occasional blue-skied-days ecstatically arrive, & then evaporate in your hands just as you grasp them. In the deeper waves, I have experienced momentary suicidal thoughts, in a “how much more pain am I willing to take in this body” kind of way.
This same friend asked with kind curiosity- “So how do you get out of a portal with no doors?”
“There’s a trap door: learn to love it.”
To me, those dark places inside are where pain can safely relax, breathe, open. There’s a twisted satisfaction of being in the throes of your own sludge. There’s comfort in the familiar, desperate smallness of the fetal position. I’m now emerging from this multi-year winter, equipped with an emerging skill for the resume: Fluency in Darkness.
Crucial to mention- I have been very well supported psychologically on this journey, by therapists, a trauma-informed yoga practice, an assortment of other healing paradigms, & an incredibly loving now-ex-partner, whose support literally saved my life. And a privilege of information that I plan to share abundantly here.
I’m used to sharing a much rosier picture of what this “winter” felt like. I keep it wholly past tense, even though the residuals still reverberate & shake me from time to time. And I’ve noticed the responses are equally as “clean.” I hear things like “You must have learned so much!” “I bet you’ll look back on this time & understand it was leading to something” “What an initiation!” or- “So, what are you going to do with this?” and the bold declaration of “You seem so good now.” (if you’ve said this to me, know that I love you and do truly appreciate your kindness).
We play this game where we wash & spin the darkness. We both grasp for “the light at the end of the tunnel” and hey I don’t fault us! We live in a kingdom of light after all1. Modern culture has sold us a fallacy of “fetishized happiness,”2 inside of which darkness exists to serve its master: light.
But, darkness is and always will be our queendom. The womb, whose maternal comfort makes new life. The cave, whose moist coolness relieves a wanderer from a simmering sun. The chrysalis, whose safe containment allows a caterpillar to surrender into soup. The shadow, whose stark contours allow us to refract and make sense of what would otherwise be blinding: light.
All of that sounds cozy, so…
Why are we afraid of the dark?
Besides the obvious — fear of death & the unknown — here’s an oversimplified primal-cultural theory:3
Darkness is well, dark. Nightfall obscures vision, fogging any sense of certainty for us creatures of daylight. How vulnerable! (in the mammalian way, not the Esther Perel/Brene Brown way) Sun falls, predator becomes prey, darkness carries bloodthirsty death.
When we learned to harness king light & carry a torch wherever we roam, our safety in the dark increased, yet we grew less & less familiar with it. Real danger was eclipsed by story. The dark became the other. And when we learned to speak, we gave more oxygen to that other with mythology. The night became represented by monsters & demons, forewarning us & inflaming our culture.
The continuum of fear and western civil development spiraled us here to now, where darkness is simply..not productive. Work happens when it’s light out. Hence the hilarity of New Year’s resolutions, placed at the dead center of winter. How dare we hibernate? We must set goals! (This is not to shame anyone for reflections & resolutions, go on and get after it, Gregorian cycles count for something!)
What if we flip the script? The underworld IS productive. And actually, what’s most worth-working-with lives in there*. It’s only a different sense of time, and a wildly different definition of productivity. Goals in the underworld: to discover what is hidden. To expand our capacity to sit in visceral discomfort. To become a more genuine keeper or all aspects of life.
*PS- our “underworlds” live in our viscera. Our bodies. My yoga-teacher-sister Debbie always says something like “the body is a map of the subconscious mind.” If you’re darkness-curious, I highly recommend some form of somatic-based exploration with a well-trained practitioner or group container.4
So go on, have a dose of darkness
Darkness for the sake of it. Darkness for the true nature of it. Because light only grows plants from seeds that germinate in dark, cold soil. Because there’s no use in harvesting mid-compost. Because heaviness brings you closer to the ground.
To be clear, I don’t mean the mental stories, but rather the living essence of wild darkness that’s brewing underneath them.
I believe the enemy of the flow of darkness & light is shame, which is why I deliberately chose to share with you that yes, I personally know the feeling of wanting to die. I want to hide as I write this, imagining who all might read it… & therein lies the point. I like to imagine this is how winter knows how to meet spring. The sun shows itself more and more from now on, eventually coaxing a sprig of a plant to poke out of heavy soil, and so on…
In that same way, my friends have been suns to my winter. Petting my hair as I reveal a dark part of me, bringing darkness to light. If you are in winter, know that you’re right on time. If you’re not, enjoy the gift of visiting someone inside of their winter, without judgment.
We will bloom soon enough my friends, but for now- shed, rot, compost, curl up with your demons. Tis the season!
J
Bayo Akomolafe put this beautifully in this inspiring piece that goes wayyyyy deeper into this world- https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/finding-the-dark-decolonizing-darkness
Another beautiful bayo-ism
Truly this theory has very little basis in history, anthropology, fact. It just sounds right and convenient to me.
Ping me if you want my “gateway to the underworld” starting points suggestions list ;)
Definitely want your “gateway to the underworld” starting points suggestions list! This was beautiful, thank you for sharing.