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“Seeing into darkness is clarity…

This is called practicing eternity.”

Lao Tzu

When our older son, Joel, was in first grade he announced one day: “You have to peel away the night to find the day.”

It’s frightening for children — and indeed for most of us — to think of not being able to peel away the dark. My colleague-writer at Divine Arts, Kiara Windrider, who speaks knowledgeably about earth cycles and global shifts, talks about the likelihood that we could one day soon face three days of no light, no sun. Darkness.

Don Alejandro, a Mayan Elder, spoke to him of thirteen prophecies, twelve of which have already come to pass. The thirteenth is yet to come: three days of darkness. When I read this, I think, “And three days of no color! How will we survive?” Here are Don Alejandro’s own words: “When you find yourself in these three days of darkness, go inside your homes, close the doors and start to celebrate. These are the times you have been waiting for.”⁸

When our boys were young, Madeleine L’Engle was a constant nighttime companion. We read together A Swiftly Tilting Planet: “Light and darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being in joyful rhythm.” L’Engle’s story goes on to describe how this dazzling light was swallowed up by a star and the glory of the harmony was broken by “screeching, by hissing, by laughter which held no merriment but was hideous, horrendous cacophony.” Who wants that? Is it our job, too, to help bring the light back? Yes! I’ve come to the conclusion, the most important thing we can do is to make the dark more conscious, as Carl Jung put it. To call things by their right and real names. And to acknowledge the shadows.

All creation comes out of nothing, the theologian Matthew Fox reminds us. “There is a necessary link between darkness, nothingness and creativity. All creation is birthing something where previously there was nothing. Darkness is the origin of everything that is born — stars born in the darkness of space, our ideas and images born in the darkness of the brain, children born from the darkness of their mothers’ wombs, movements of liberation born from the darkness of slavery and pain.”⁹

For the Dogon people in Africa, night is the beginning. Full of possibility. Night is a combination of white, red, and black and embodies all the primordial elements and the spirit of divinity. Air is identified with white; earth and water with black; fire with red. These three colors were the ones also used by our earlier cave-painting ancestors in Europe. The early Australian aborigines had only these color names, as well. And they are the three colors most associated with early goddess figures around the globe. In a perverse move, no doubt seeking to establish ancient roots, Hitler chose those very three to color his swastikas.

Winter solstice marks the time when we lie down to sleep each night assured the next day will be a few minutes longer. Around 3500 B.C.E., Celts in Ireland marked this returning light at their “cave of the sun” by constructing an earth chamber we now call New Grange in County Meath, twenty-five miles north of Dublin. It was once covered with thousands of white quartz stones. Even with most of the white stones gone, it’s still an impressive World Heritage Site with its intricate carvings and aisles of stone. Our ancient relatives in Ireland were at ease with the darker “underworld.” For three mornings in late December the sun streams through a square window and illuminates a triple spiral on the far wall. This experience was once described by a visitor, George Russell: “A light began to glow and pervade the cave, and to obliterate the stone walls and the antique hieroglyphs written thereon, and to melt the earthen floor into itself like a fiery sun suddenly uprisen within the world, and there was everywhere a wandering ecstasy of sound: light and sounds were one; light had a voice, and the music hung glittering in the air…”¹⁰

Over the years, many mystics have embraced the dark. Juan de Yepes, for one. He lived in Spain in the sixteenth century, the son of poor silk weavers. Now we call him St. John of the Cross. He left home at fourteen to serve the poor and severely ill and eventually became a priest. After meeting Teresa of Avila, he helped found her Carmelite Order. For refusing to return to Medina and choosing instead to remain with Teresa’s nuns, he was imprisoned for nine months in a cell six feet by ten feet and beaten three times a week by the monks who imprisoned him. In the dark and cold, he was “visited” by angels. One night he escaped with his poetry under his arm. In Dark Night of the Soul, he describes how the soul must empty itself in order to be filled with God. He called this “soul-purging.” We emerge from the Dark and are filled with flaming light and love. He quotes Job who said, “In the night my mouth is pierced with sorrows and they that feed upon me sleep not.” John of the Cross struggled in “dark contemplations” with doubts and misgivings, but he repeats again and again the words “on a dark night, kindled in love with yearnings, I went forth…” He described the illuminations we experience on earth as the “lightnings of God… produced by this Divine contemplation in the faculties of the soul.”¹¹ The soul, he said, puts on three colors: the white tunic of faith, a green livery for hope and security, and a splendid over-garment of purple for charity. He died at forty-nine, after writing the words, “In the happy night. In secret, when none saw me, nor I beheld aught, without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.”¹²

People who suffer clinical depression know how light eclipses them and they often see only in shades of gray. Parker Palmer, the prolific writer, teacher, and activist for justice, describes his own descent into Dante’s “dark woods” in Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. Palmer did not respond to depression with passivity or resignation but rather as an explorer. He felt he was moving into a field where one’s deepest self seems alien. This mystery, he said, demands that we reject simplistic answers, both “religious” and “scientific.” “The deeper we go into the heart’s darkness or its light, the closer we get to the ultimate mystery of God.”

Depression is a void, an empty place… “the ultimate state of disconnection” as Palmer put it. It deprives one of that relatedness that is the lifeline of every living being. But from the dark void, as many creation stories describe it, out of the chaos, comes life. All of our colorful creativity, it seems, stems from this dark place.