Writing about Sweet Darkness

[Shepherd]

I have begun my year-end reflections and invite you to join me. I'm writing about darkness. If you have anything to add to, change, or quibble with in regards to the following draft, please send it to me.
Thanks, SB

Sweet Darkness

DRAFT: CRITCISMS SOLICITED, to [email protected]

By Shepherd Bliss

A poem with an unusual coupling of words appeared on my computer screen one cold, wet Winter morning. “Sweet Darkness” it declared. Actually, warm summer was what I was longing for. But the poems sent out by Sebastopol City Councilmember Larry Robinson here in our small town in Northern California are usually intriguing, so rather than push the delete button, I opened it up. My reward was to see more deeply into the possibilities of sweetness in a time of darkness—literal, seasonal, political, and figurative.

“The night will give you a horizon/ further than you can see,” Welsh-Americn poet David Whyte assured me, providing me something to look forward to. Night sight has never been my strength, but a full moon was scheduled for that night, so I went out to check it out. Indeed, there was much to see with the benefit of that diffuse, less-focused light. I saw familiar redwoods, oaks, and other things, but the perspective had changed, hence my perception was different. I felt a larger context within which we humans dwell. In addition to the guidance of our daylight logic, we could benefit from the insight of night-time’s more diffuse lunar light within its ample darkness.

“The world was made to be free in,” Whyte added. I began to think about the things that impede our freedoms—war, governments, terrorism, and other external threats. Then I came upon other obstacles—my own limitations and ways of thinking, doing, and being. Those are the things that I can do the most about—my own barriers to exercising greater freedom and liberty.

The poem stimulated me to drive an hour to Ocean Song, a wilderness and farm center near the Pacific Ocean. I climbed Solstice Hill, where I have gone irregularly for decades at that cold time of year in late December for the longest and darkest day of the year, which also signals the return of the light. The beauty rendered me speechless. Celebrating the regular seasonal transitions, like the two solstices and two equinoxes, have been added by some to contemporary cultural and religious celebrations that punctuate our annual calendars.

CHILDHOOD AND MIDLIFE MEMORIES

I’m in my sixties now, closer to death than birth. I’ve been doing what the gerontological literature describes as life review, going back to places where I used to live and have not been for years—places within and outside-- remembering things forgotten.

My skin color is what would be described as olive; my eyes are brown and my hair was brown, until it turned bright silver. My ancestry is mainly European, though within parts of my family there have long been suspicions of darker blood lines that were not openly acknowledged, but are partially visible. While teaching in multi-cultural Hawai’i for most of the last three years, I came to understand myself as what they describe there as “mixed plate.” Most of us are more than what is most visible; within the “white,’ there is often unacknowledged black, brown, and other.

As long as I can remember I’ve been drawn to women with dark skin, dark eyes and dark hair. Perhaps this is due, at least partly, to having spent part of my early childhood in Panama, many of whose people have African blood. I am drawn to otherness. The key women in my adult life have been women of color—Black, Asian, Latina, Persian, and Hawaiian. Some mutual recognition happens, beneath the surface.

Two memories from my childhood return: One is a black panther, whose scream from the time it got into our basement I can still hear. Another is the jungle not too far outside our back door. Today it is called a rainforest. That jungle teemed with life, even in its darkest corners. Those plants and animals— including the boa constrictor that wrapped itself around the tree in our yard and the sloth that dangled from a jungle tree—provided a wildness in my childhood that still guides and comforts me.

This essay began forming itself as I prepared to make my way back to Northern New Mexico during the darkest month of the year, after too long an absence of many decades. I used to hang out there with a Chicano curandera, folk healer, who glowed in the dark. I have unfinished business in New Mexico, as well as in old Mexico and Chile—darknesses that I left behind, rather than integrated. I’m on a soul retrieval. Integrating one’s own darknesses and those that have come toward one is essential para vida, for true life. Journeys are often a good time to reflect on darkness.


THE WISE, DARK WIND FROM BENEATH THE SURFACE

Modern Euro-centric societies tend to light up the night with headlights, streetlights, houselights and many other lights, rather than relish the dark’s unique gifts. In contrast to contemporary attempts to ignore and deny the dark with its abundant refreshing qualities, religious traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism and ancient Greek and Roman mythologies tend to embrace it.

In Semitic languages and early Christianity “black” and “wise” were associated. Many religious stories of descent exist—Jesus after the crucifixion, the Greeks Orpheus and Persephone, and the Sumerian Innana. St. John of the Cross spoke of the “Dark Night of the Soul,” a journey which was difficult but ultimately restorative.

When one is called to el mundo subterraneo, the underworld, or is dragged there by a dark force, he or she may return with rich stories to tell. Some, of course, do not make it back. The mad Romantic German poet Frederich Holderlin wrote that “poetically dwells man on the Earth.” He described the poet’s vocation as going from the mountain of the people to the mountain of the “gods.” But an abyss stretches between them. And once the poet gets there, why come back?

But in the modern United States, darkness has taken on such a negative tone, which is not inherent and has not always there. “Dark” is even used to label that which is allegedly inferior. Malevolent forms of darkness do indeed exist. But my concern in this essay is with benevolent, or sweet, darkness. It goes by various names and is a gift when it arrives or is recognized.

In her poem “Face the Black” Sonoma County poet Sher Christian writes the following: “Don’t elude the black through haze/ of drugs, hate, blame, or food./ We feed our dread/ when we live in evasion zones.”

Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca speaks of poetry, music, and art that carries el duende, which does not translate into English. It is a mysterious word that has to do with the wind and brings life to a poem or art form from some dim, hidden place. The soul is more likely to ride in on a dark wind than on a bright ray of light, which is more likely to carry spirit. This soul/spirit distinction is one that archetypal psychologist James Hillman makes in his essay “Peaks and Vales.”


We could benefit by recapturing some of the association of darkness with wisdom and its other positive aspects. My best writing begins during the dark mornings of the night, before sunlight, w hen there is less external stimulation and more internal activity. Then by day I can fine-tune the words.

POEMS ON DARKNESS

Whyte’s poem stimulated me to seek more poems about darkness from Robinson and other friends. “Night cancels the business of day,” the Persian poet Rumi declared back in the thirteenth century. “Be refreshed in the darkness,” he added. “You darkness, that I come from and love so much,” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, originally in German, once again describing that wider context within which we all live. Scientists describe it as dark matter and dark energy, which is still mysterious to them, such as how gravity works and holds us on the Earth.

“If I reached my hands down, near the earth,/ I could take handfuls of darkness!/ A darkness was always there, which we never noticed,” Minnesota poet Robert Bly writes as he notices that “the grass is half-covered with snow” at the beginning of a long Northern winter.

Kentucky farmer/poet Wendell Berry encourages us to “know that the dark, too,/ blooms and sings,/and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,/ I meet my shadow in the deepening shade,” Theodore Roethke writes. He reminds us that we carry our personal darkness, our shadow, with us all the time, casting it behind us as we walk, usually unaware.

“I stand in the dark for a long time,” Lynn Martin writes in “Under the Walnut Tree,” “..unable/ to tell anyone, not even the night,/ what I know, I feel the darkness/ rush towards me, and I open my arms.” That opening is what I mean to advocate.

Boston poet May Sarton reminds us that “without darkness/ Nothing comes to birth.” Maybe this darkness is not as bad as I was thinking that cold, wet morning when a poem arrived that lead me into myself and to other poems.



PSYCHOLOGISTS REFLECT ON DARKNESS

Whyte’s “Sweet Darkness” poem initiated a study of darkness in poetry for me. It also led me to the psychology of Carl Jung and those influenced by his depth and archetypal psychology. Jung wrote about the “night sea journey.”

“Nothing makes the light, the wonder, the reassure stand out as well as darkness,” writes Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her book “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” “The recovery of the divine is done in the dark,” she adds. Estes later describes “night-consciousness,” noting, “Things are different at night…Night is when we are closer to ourselves, closer to essential ideas and feelings that do not register so much during the day.” There is less to distract us when the nigh cloak falls on everything except that which is closest. It is also in darkness that we dream, revealing parts of ourselves that are otherwise hidden.

Many artists, such as Edward Munch, have also painted darkness, including his “Madonna.” In “Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna” China Gallant studies the subject in religious traditions. I was lead to this and other accounts of the Dark Feminine by various midlife women: Lou Montgomery did her doctoral studies at the Pacfiica Graduate Institute on the Indian goddess Kali. Lin Marie deVincent, a Sonoma Valley poet currently studying philosophy at Dominican University, reminded me of the work of Starhawk on darkness. Batja Cates works with the Healdsburg Literary Guild, coordinates various poetry efforts in Sonoma County, and sent me poems from up North. Santa Rosa poet bSue Stephenson sent some lovely poems stimulated by the death of her partner.

“We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image. Because the dark creates us,” Starhawk writes in her book “Dreaming the Dark.” Starhawk later adds, “How do we find the dark within and transform it, own it as our own power? How do we dream it into a new image, dream it into actions that will change the world into a place where no more horror stories happen, where there are no more victims? Where the dark is kind and charged with a friendly power: the power of the unseen, the power that comes from within.”

The blues and other musical forms can also access melancholy and various forms of darkness.

"Midway along the journey of life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood.” Dante begins “The Divine Comedy,” which many consider the greatest poem ever written.

PERSONAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DARKNESS

For most of the last fifteen years I have lived and worked on an organic farm. I regularly bring in manure as fertilizer to feed my soil, so that my berries, apples, and other plants will flourish. “Shoveling shit,” as farmers call it, has been a pleasure. I know that this “brown gold” will bring forth tasty fruit. Darkness can be fruitful, in various forms, which some people shy away from. The dark Earth provides our eternal grounding.

Chthonic is an unfamiliar word to many. It refers to the spirits of the underworld. Many spiritual traditions tend to emphasize spirit as up, on Mt. Zion, Mt. Gilead, or Mt. Olympus. I am drawn to more grounded views, which is why I named my agricultural operation Kokopelli Farm. Tibet’s spiritual leader, the current Dali Lama, commented that part of his job is to encourage the monks to descend from the high Himalayans into the dark valleys, which feed their souls. Valleys are places for tears, soul-making, and endarkenment, whereas mountains tend to nourish spirit and enlightenment.

When I walk into the tall redwoods on the land where I live, even at noon, it is dark. When I walked down into the Waipio Valley on the Hawai’i Island, it gradually got darker. A guide took me into a giant “yoni cave”—a lava tube that Pele had created on the Big Island beneath the surface by flowing down the volcano and giving birth to more dark land. We went in one morning during the bright tropical sun and seemed to be in the moist darkness for an hour or so, with only a tiny light, kind of scary. When we came out, it was pitch dark. “What happened to the sun?” I asked her. “It’s night,” she responded. I had apparently lost all sense of time, loosing that anchor, there beneath the dark Earth’s surface.

I usually awaken before dawn and relish the final moments of the night, which led me years ago to write the poem “Embrace the Dark.” As I awoke one late November morning this year, the sky started to become first white, then blue, then laced with pink-colored clouds. Tiny dark forms (birds) flew by in a Southern direction. I watched them for a while, as thousands flew by. Perhaps they do this every year, but I do not remember noticing them before. This new attention to darkness enables me to see much that is always there, but not so visible if one is focused exclusively on the light.

One morning as I wrote this I looked into the woodland outside the redwood cabin where I write. Surrounded by and nestled within some dark leaves and branches, I spotted a bright almost-white trunk, brilliantly set off by its velvety cover. I had never noticed this trunk from this angle and with this unique blend of lightness/darkness.

Sometimes I conceive of the Dark as a dance partner. She is more feminine than masculine. I do not try to lead, but rather to follow. The Dark just is. Whatever fear occurs in her presence seems to be what I or others bring. Perhaps the Dark is merely neutral, any malevolence or sweetness being what I bring to that relationship.

If you give more attention to darkness, you can see more, both within and outside. Dealing with darkness and weaving its multiple benefits into my life (and avoiding its pitfalls) seem to be my main Winter task here at the end of 2006. In the darkness one can rest and be renewed. Perhaps Spring will come again.

[Dixon]

Yo, Shepherd;

In addition to my poems about darkness which I've sent you privately, something else occurs to me: You oughta find the lyrics to the excellent song "Darkness Darkness" by the Youngbloods. It's on their "Elephant Mountain" album.

Dixon

I have begun my year-end reflections and invite you to join me. I'm writing about darkness. If you have anything to add to, change, or quibble with in regards to the following draft, please send it to me.
Thanks, SB

Sweet Darkness

[Sabrina]

I've been meaning to send this to you, and finally when Dixon mentioned Darkness, darkness, I wonder if this is the same "darkness darkness" that he Recommended. Recently a family member died, and this was one of his favorite songs, and included in his death ceremony program. It says it's by Jesse Colin Young (Robert Plant) . Anyway, the words:

Darkness, Darkness, be my pillow,
Take my head and let me sleep.
In the coolness of your shadow,
In the silence of your deep.

Darkness, darkness, hide my yearning
For the things I cannot see.
Keep my mind from constant turning
To the things I cannot be.

Darkness, darkness, be my blanket,
Cover me with the endless night.
Take away this pain of knowing,
Fill the emptiness with light
Emptiness with light now.

Darkness, darkness,
long and lonesome,
Is the day that brings me here.
I have felt the edge of sadness,
I have known the depths of fear.

Darkness, Darkness, be my pillow,
Take my head and let me sleep.
In the coolness of your shadow,
In the silence of your deep.
In the silence of your deep.

Sabrina