Gratitude for Darkness

“Darkness is the light most feared.”

The Solstice season is upon us. This is the time when one traditionally celebrates the return of the light. Each year we live through the darkest part of the year and focus most of our joy and gratitude upon the celestial turning that returns to us beginnings and new light. This is the season of the Christmas story, Kwanzaa, Hannukah, and the New Year. We, collectively, celebrate and honor the light that shows up in the darkest hour.

This year, perhaps perversely, I find myself thinking about my gratitude for darkness. I am well aware that what I am — some strange and contradictory combination of brokenness and wholeness — is a product, not of light, but, of darkness. I wheel around aware that I had to be dragged into hellish darkness to be forged into a new man — a lesser and paradoxically more capable being. It turns out that the Abyss is part of my parentage.

I used to think of myself as a kind of diplomat, an emissary from the realm of the needy. I was one who never hesitated to say that asking for help was one of the most community building things one could do. I was skewed enough to contradict the Bible and say that it actually is more blessed to need (to ask and receive) than to give. Now, however, I’ve come to see that I am really the ambassador of darkness. I came out of a place so dark that I never want to go back there, but all of my gifts of awareness were given to me there, and I have come to believe it is the darkness that gives Life.

I don’t have a Christmas tree, colored lights, or even candles, but I do have three wise men. They are all that remains of a once mainstream Christian life. They have stuck with me, and accompanied me during my lonely, sometimes solitudinal, dark vigils. I’ve come to see them differently, not just as heroes that persevered through the desert following a star, but as actual kings of the darkness, who have shown-up to pay homage to what the darkness has wrought. The star of Bethlehem is to me a product of the dark mystery surrounding it.

When I first had my stroke, and had to wait for declining year after declining year to find out if I would live, I used to curse the darkness of Creation. I was confused by the painfulness uncertainty of my life. I didn’t know then what I do now. I was being re-worked, re-made. In an invisible studio I was fitted with an awareness that could only come from suffering and helplessness. The hands that held and re-shaped me were not only invisible and non-palpable, they were stained with darkness, so deep and merciful that I could not imagine it.

Today, I have the pleasure of knowing many elders, old people who have known dark times – the sometimes painful, uncertain, and seemingly unending periods (where there is no human solace deep enough to last) — create compassionate understanding and real character. The darkness of Life, if it doesn’t kill one, confers a depth of humanity that cannot be attained any other way. In fact, darkness is the birthplace of depth. Hidden in the shadows is a dark gem, not one anyone can grasp, but one that sometimes grasps us. The broken body, job, relationship, or lifestyle, is a terrible well-spring that unleashes hard-won wisdom into the world.

I don’t really know how to be thankful for such a demanding and seemingly arbitrary fruitfulness. I feel hugely ambivalent about even harboring this awareness. I know I have much to give thanks for, that some angel must have had to endure a lot to give me a chance to write these words, but I would not wish this experience upon anyone. The darkness is just too exacting.

Still, here in the traumatized aftermath, I am thankful! I don’t really know how to express it, I don’t know how to honestly honor the unimaginable, but I know I owe this part of what is good about my life, to that which perched and feed upon me long enough that I became a being capable of being grateful for darkness. To me, this is the real gift of the season, one that in this dark-age offers a great deal.

In the end, I guess I write these words to remember what darkness has granted me, and to remind everyone that light sometimes shows up as darkness.

Trust

Trust. Trust is something that seems so undermined, that I no longer feel that we, as a species, would trust any human-made solution to our current environmental/economic crisis. It seems, that people no longer believe in people. And I guess there is good reason for this. Never-the-less, this development concerns me, it leaves me wondering about our social nature. The other, who is all of us, seems to threaten us. The other, each of us, seems to be a big bogey-man, an obstacle to peace, stability, and progress. Trust is low and very conditional. I am suffering because I am assumed to be a threat, before I even get a chance to interact. I am deemed untrust-worthy until I prove myself trust-worthy.

Maybe this is the way things are supposed to be. Maybe access to the commons is supposed to be contingent upon the right kind of behavior. I feel troubled by the level of distrust that seems to prevail everywhere however. I’m not talking about the kind of trust involved in leaving the door to your house, or car, unlocked. I’m talking about the kind of trust that is involved in leaving one’s heart and mind unlocked, the kind of trust that means engaging openly with an other.

I’ve been a psychotherapist long enough to know that this kind of trust is an inside job. The glib way to say it is that we trust others exactly a much as we trust ourselves. This seems to be one of the biggest problems that faces us. How can I trust another if I can’t trust me? Hold on, don’t be your self yet, because I’m not sure I can handle it. Hold on, I’m not even sure I can handle me being me yet. Until I am sure about me being me, I’m not really able to handle you being you. And if I’m just faking it, to reassure myself I’m trust-worthy, then everyone is suspect, because they might upset my delicate balance.

Unfortunately, even trusting your self is inadequate. The other is simply a shadowy projection of the self, not truly an other with mysterious, uncertain origins. Now reality is just too psychological. Self-trust is necessary, but only a step in the right direction. This is, admittedly, a step that is rarely taken. It represents a developmental achievement, which does ease distrust, but it doesn’t actually let the wild other run free. The other is satisfyingly us, a kind of unity gets to be in the world, but only at the price of diversity. The other isn’t perceived as having a reality of its own.

I’m not really too good at being someone’s projection. Actually, I resent it. I don’t want to be that tame. Instead, I want to be met. to have my authentic aliveness interact with another’s, to be a wild and uncertain beings meeting.  Each interaction, I would hope, has a flavor of first contact — me, alien, you, just as alien. Now what?

But what is trust then? Certainly it isn’t something I want to place in something or someone else. That is a risk. Keeping it to myself is an option, I know me well enough to at least be predictable. But, wait a minute! I also know myself well enough to know I have limitations, I may not perceive all the possible threats. I’m not totally trust-worthy. Trusting me is a better bet, for sure, than trusting another, but not a sure one. Is there a sure one?

I don’t think there is. Reality is a wild crapshoot. Yuck, and of course! I place my trust in the best illusion I can find, and only then, because it reassures me, not because it renders me any more secure. Strangely, and paradoxically, when I get this vulnerable, when I realize this is the way life is, that everything and everyone that exists is equally uncertain and vulnerable in this way: I become more trust-worthy, and more trusting. The untrust-worthiness of life generates greater trust.

This is the trust I want to bring to life. The trust-worthiness of knowing of how untrust-worthy life can be. The other doesn’t exist in any way for my sake. I don’t exist in any way for their sake. We share the vulnerability that comes with existence, and we can’t do anything about it.

I trust how untrust-worthy life is. That makes the other something I have no way of relating to. That makes of me an innocent, an empty-pocketed traveler, in a mysterious world, encountering the other like I would an ocean, a mountain, a herd of elk, or any other phenomena of nature. I am trust-worthy because I no longer carry a need for trust.

This is the kind of trust that can make relations more trust-worthy, but is it the kind of trust I am willing to put my faith in?

Goo

A few days ago a friend described to me a metaphor for metamorphosis that set me to thinking. He was watching a video of Barbara Marx Hubbard when she described the transformation, in the chrysalis, from caterpillar to butterfly. We had each heard the details of this change before. He found himself wondering about the soup of former caterpillar that was to become a butterfly. I too wondered about the soup, the gooey soup of butterfly potential. My wondering goes beyond the resistance to change that the final caterpillar cells manifest, to the properties of the transforming goo.  That wondering follows, and takes form, uncertainly, just as the cells of the new emerge from soup of the old.

There is something, somewhere, that knows what it is doing. The goo goes from no form, the broken-down mess of a caterpillar, to a newer more functional being, a butterfly. No one seems to know how. The goo seems to be part of a mystery that beguiles and threatens us. Efforts to aid, or try to speed-up, the emergence of the butterfly, only end-up with deformed, or dead, butterflies. So we know the process of this transformation is beyond us.

Or is it? So much of this mystery has been investigated. The goo has been looked at chemically and genetically. Currently, we tend to see the properties of this substance as the agent of transformation. The goo seems to contain the magic. But, I’ve been wondering if it isn’t just the goo, but something else, something the goo belongs to, and expresses, that may be the power behind this alchemical miracle.

I tend towards thinking there is “something larger” afoot. I don’t mean God, but something more mysterious and less defined than human notions of God. For lack of better words I call it Life. In this scenario, Life surges through the chrysalis, organizing the butterfly, to give expression to itself. It is only right that our attention is riveted to the chrysalis, to the miracle of transformation that takes place within. That shift of forms is so compelling.

A funny thing happened on the way to existence. Nature endowed us with all of its powers. This includes the power to transform like we see done in the chrysalis. Humanity has a track record of transformation. We call it evolution. Somehow we have been mesmerized into forgetting what we already know, that is, how to transform ourselves, how to evolve. What takes place in the chrysalis, takes place in our lives; but, instead of noticing these changes within, we get caught up in believing its only happening out there.

The potential to change lies within us. This is the good and bad news; good because transformation gives us hope, bad because it contributes to our sense of failed responsibility and deficiency. We have forgotten how connected we are, and with that connection, how the potential for change is also all around us. The hope is real. Change is happening. If we want to influence the direction of that change then we best be at the process of trying to align the inside and outside potential.

This brings me back to the goo. I think it has a lot to teach us about how to align ourselves with the power of transformation. There is something about being reduced that seems to insure that something new emerges. Life often does that to us. When it does we often call it a tragedy, accident, failure, sickness, or happenstance. If one is lucky then a new more sensitive and aware being emerges from the fire of that hardship. But we seldom invite that kind of change. We think of it as traumatic.

Isn’t there a trauma free variety of change? Yes, and no. The amount of trauma goes down as one learns to lean into the fire of transformation, but because it isn’t something one alone can accomplish, the outcome is unpredictable and often wildly unexpected. Trauma then correlates with expectation.

What I am interested in, is embodying the attributes of the goo. I’d like to learn how to live with less definition than I am used to, tolerating uncertainty, learning how to ‘not know’ well. I think I am becoming goo, as I get older, as I let go, and paradoxically, as I come to terms with my limitations. Maybe my death, the seemingly ultimate reduction of my being, makes me into goo.

I like to think so. I’ll trust creation to make something serviceable. In the meantime I think I’ll become the best goo I can be. Luckily, greying seems to be helping.

Self-Hatred

 It has been a challenge to bring myself to this writing. Examining self-hatred is a painful thing to do. I know this particular form of suffering runs rampant in our world. I know I am complicitous. I know that many of you probably are too. Let’s look together, through the lens of my particular brand of self-hate, at how much damage we participate in.

I am not proud of the way I am. I know I’m probably not over it, and I look forward to the day when I’m old enough and mature enough that I can treat myself as respectfully as the rest of nature. Oh dear, I just realized, I probably do that already. What I need to face, is how much my way of treating myself leaks over into the way I treat everything, and everybody else. This is a hard-earned realization, which is still unfolding.

The horror that rises from realizing that I’ve been treating my loved ones, this beautiful green life, and others, with the same disdain I’ve been heaping on my self, is also compassion-raising. I like that I care enough to take the emotionally-chagrining hit of this glimpse at how misdirected, wrong and oblivious I’ve been. I know that is part of the way forward. Speaking of moving forward, I so want the pain of this recognition to be over. I want to move on to being a better me. But I’m savvy enough now to know that I have to stay in this pain for awhile to realize to a greater extent what I have wrought.

Self-hatred, which is so terribly destructive to self, and other, is a natural occurrence. I have trouble with that. It is so painful, it must mean something is desperately wrong! Not so, but acting like something is wrong, is part of the very same self-hatred that I want to overcome, and don’t want to look at. Continuing to look is extremely painful, disheartening, and paradoxically courageous and compassionate.

What I see is a part of how hard it is to be human. I have the tendency to hate, or have a hard time with, the wild, unruly, uncontrollable parts of my self. They seem to have lives of their own. I tend to hate the parts of me that are other, that threaten to reveal me, or take me into vulnerable and unknown places. Sitting here, in the fire of painful realization, I see, that like my war-mongering, slave-holding ancestors, I discriminate against what I cannot control. I revolt against what threatens me. I hate (that means I actively try to eliminate) the other, both in myself and in the world.

There is nothing quite so humbling as acceptance. I see that I tend to hate my self, and create great damage to others, because my self doesn’t conform to my ideas of who I should be. I think I ought to be what I think I should be. But I’m not. I’ve spent too much of my life not-accepting who and what I am. What I’m learning to accept, is not some spiritual bromide about loving everything, but the fact that my self does not belong to me. I am life’s life.

I am more other than I have ever suspected. I belong to Life, that is what is living through me, using this opportunity to advance creation, exercising an agenda of its own.

From this perspective, born of more painful awareness than I would normally allow myself to endure, I can see that I have so wanted to fit in, to be acceptable on my own terms, that I haven’t accepted my own true nature. In the process I haven’t accepted the true nature of anything or anyone else. My refusal to accept this aspect of who I am has generated a lot of suffering everywhere. I have been like a “typhoid Mary” spreading my suffering around to anyone (or anything) that remotely resembles parts of me I don’t like. And, I haven’t liked, or trusted very much, the parts of me that have never been mine.

The truth is that I have been unwilling to accept my own true nature. I can look at this with some compassion for two reasons. I’ve grown up in this self/other hating culture, and I’ve at last come to the place in my growth where I can handle knowing the truth of this way of being human. Evolution just got to me. The fire of painful realization is growing me.

I don’t like knowing how much suffering I generate. I don’t like looking at the natural holocaust I have helped to create. But, I know that having a vivid experience of these things is a vast improvement. Now I have more choice. Now I have some possibility of doing something different — with myself, and with others (including nature). I am trying to figure out what that is. And honestly, and surprisingly, I like myself better for looking at how much I have let hatred run my life. So, out of this lesson, and my ongoing discovery of the compassion-inducing awfulness of my own choices, comes a new possibility. Maybe, just maybe, I could learn to hold the mystery of my self, and the mysteriousness of the other (in all its myriad of challenging forms) a little more kindly, like the one mystery they are.