Winter Solstice 2015- Darkness is my Mother
November 4, 2022
It is the holy of holy days. It is the day we wish would never come. It is the long night we wish we didn’t have to sit through. The light is in short supply.
I sit through this darkness, and lose track of my daytime senses. I let myself dissolve into the void. It is the coming apart before creation. It is the letting go of everything I know or thought I knew. It is the absolute blindness of not knowing what may happen next, or if, really, there is anything next. To trust in this moment is a stretch, feels scary, feels like dying. And I choose to nestle further into this womb space that feels like a grave which it is; both. This is when practice is essential. This time when I lose myself to the darkness is the exact time when all my hours of meditation, all my yearning prayers, all my striving and hoping come into a still and profound silence. In this space may the practice meditate me, the prayers pray me, and the stillness hold this present infinity…ever moving and motionless between the breath.
In the middle of this darkness I choose my own undoing. I unravel my self. I don’t need it here in the middle of this breath or the whole Universe breathing. I need only the emptiness which is the fullness of everything. It is here encircling me, nurturing me like the fertile soil, like the fecund sea. I give my self into that liminal space. The darkness is my mother. She gently destroys all that I cling to. She strips me and prepares me for birth, for creation. I can’t take anything with me but this soul force and so I open my hands ready for everything I can never be prepared for. I let go.
Sit with me tonight and be undone. Sit with me tonight and wait for the darkest of the dark to envelop us. Sit with me through the hours stretched out seemingly endlessly. Sit until the darkness turns, the earth turns, my heart turns. Until the dawn, which has always come, proves herself trustworthy again. I cannot see her from here. The darkness is all there is. How will you open to the darkness? How will you wait for the turning?