To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is travelled by dark feet and dark wings
A note on the prompts & monthly depth writing pod
At the end of this dispatch you’ll find depth writing prompts to channel your creativity & expand your sense of possibility. You can interpret the prompts any way you wish. You might want to do them now or when you have a quiet moment later on. You can do them on your own or with a friend. Or you can join the monthly depth writing pod on Monday January 13th, 7pm - 8.15pm GMT to do the prompts with others in a friendly & supportive online space.
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Read on or listen to the audio to explore
How light pollution is cancelling the stars
The cosmic hologram & the true nature of the universe
The dark light of dreams
Image: Ѩвѻҏ Ѫєљѩӡӄѻ҇в (Pexels)
Knee-deep in darkness
Little by little the light is rubbed out erasing the shaggy flank of the hillside and the muddy centuries-old path until, soon, we are knee-deep in darkness. Across the valley, only the spine of the moor is distinct against the fleece of low cloud where the night is slowly spilling through a tear in the lining.
From the slippery step of a style, I stare into the creases of the darkness. Somewhere stuffed inside is the hidden pearl of a full moon and the evanescent glitter of a Winter meteor shower. But there’s no chance of seeing either through the dense, dark padding of cloud. I can barely see the puddles that gleam on our path and can only imagine what’s buried further out.
The dark forces us to slow down, tread carefully, pay attention. The oily water running down off the moor, the smell of dead fern, the whisper of breath all seem to seem to condense into their pure essence as everything else dissolves into blackness. Bundled into the tents of our coats, we plough on through the lumps and bumps of the night’s woolly fabric as the solid facts of our surroundings become more unmoored by the minute. Are we still on the path? Is that really a rock? How do we know we’ve come to the right gate? Wait – where has my husband suddenly gone?
But it is not all dark.
A cry slips from the mute shadows. Maybe a finch, or a wagtail late to roost or simply confused, tricked into taking the woozy swim of headlights, street lamps and strip lights radiating from the valley below as sunlight.
The colonisation of night
Tonight, we can’t see the moon and the stars mostly because of the cloud but astronomers predict that twenty years from now, we won’t be able to see any of the major constellations because of our seemingly insatiable desire to colonise the dark.
But what is it about the darkness that compels us to expel it?
As children we commonly fear the monster under the bed, the ghost in the shadows, the sandman who fills our eyes with grit. But long after we’ve left childhood behind our terror of the unknown seems to stay with us. We demonise the unfamiliar and strange, catastrophise the future, are terrified of change.
At least, this is the way the small, frequently fragile part of ourselves that’s our ego seems to behave. Often officious and commonly controlling, prone to judging, analysing and above all, to knowing, it’s this egoic part of our selves that prefers to operate out of the high contrast, easily navigable binaries of black and white, good and bad, right and wrong, us and them.
In an age of catastrophic mass extinction, ecological devastation, genocides, pandemics, the rise of artificial intelligence and increase in chaos and uncertainty at all levels of society, no wonder our egoic compulsion to eradicate the night and flood it with light.
We hurl ourselves with great gusto into hunting down the truth, seizing the facts, capturing data, nailing precise definitions, taking back control, eliminating doubt, conscripting truth in the process to the league of belief and opinion.
But in our haste to know everything, we forget that 95 percent of the universe is made up of impenetrable light-eating dark materials whose true nature remains shrouded in mystery.
Just as we only partially know the true nature of the universe, so we only partially know the true nature of ourselves.
As Carl Jung observed; ‘it must be admitted that things exist in the psyche about which we know little or nothing at all but which nevertheless affect our bodies in the most obstinate way and that they possess at least as much reality as the physical world which ultimately we do not understand, either.’
Not only does our compulsion to fill the night with artificial light confuse the birds - accelerating biodiversity loss while driving up rates of sleep and mood disorders - it’s canceling the stars.
We keep the lights on to stop the thief in the night. But what if we are the thieves of the night?
To know the dark
To look up at the night sky, on the other hand, is to glimpse the infinite potential of a continuously expanding multiverse where anything is possible and nothing is fixed.
It’s to encounter our origins in the great cosmic womb from which atoms and cells, planets and stars, rivers and trees, bats and bears, poetry and guns all proceed and know that the fabric of the universe is mostly dark.
This eternal unknowable darkness, the Vedic scholars of ancient India named Indra’s Net, the medieval Scholastics called the unus mundus and cosmologist Jude Currivan terms the ‘cosmic hologram’. To know this darkness is to be humble rather than grandiose, curious rather than certain and open to the mysterious unknown ‘other’ which is nothing less than what we really are.
We meet with this darkness on its own terms through the shadowy figures of our dreams whose strange comings and goings make little sense to our daylight selves. The same week I went for a walk in the dark, I dreamt I was delivering a lecture in a large amphitheatre to which no one was listening. No matter what I did to get the attention of the audience, they carried on talking amongst themselves as if I was not there. I felt out of my depths, invisible, incompetent and sick with panic because in this dark moonlit landscape my little old dream ego was not in control.
Meanwhile, on the dim, dusky periphery of this amphitheatre, an orchestra was playing which I understood had nothing to do with me. Then, apparently from nowhere, I was given a map depicting a moonlit lake at the centre of which was a dark island.
But what was the meaning of this map? Who or what was the audience, the conductor, the dark island, the lake?
Meanwhile, the orchestra
On the dark hillside above the valley, I hear the soft clump of a boot at my back and a warm hand slips into mine. My husband back at my side, we sit on a solitary bench. Pressed into the shadows, our legs and arms merge with the legs and arms of the bench and the hill at our back.
Nothing seems distinct except the holographic border of dark dividing moor from cloud.
In this dark moonlit landscape, I find myself reflecting upon the map in my dream. A memory surfaces of a trip to the tiny Scottish island of Iona. I’m standing on a beach looking out over the water at ever smaller islands receding one after the other into the mist.
I think about how although the islands that day appeared to be separate, deep beneath the waves they were fused together in the same dark mass of ancient rock.
My thoughts turn to the tiny island of our bench. If anyone were to gaze at our side of the valley from the opposite side, I muse, we’d be indecipherable from the night, fused together with the fuzzy mound of the hill - nothing more or less than the darkness observing itself.
It’s getting cold and the damp of the moor is starting to seep into our bones. I take one last glance over my shoulder. There, blooming like a rose in the dark are the Winter meteor showers. I gaze at the deep pink light pulsing through the cloud and imagine a conductor beating time to the strobing night somewhere just out of ear shot.
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Let’s discuss in the comments below
What different cultural attitudes inform your beliefs and feelings about the dark?
What does it mean to ‘go dark’?
Why might we choose to - or not?
Depth writing prompts
Reflect - what’s your relationship with control? What do you feel in control of? When and where don’t you feel in control? How do you deal with uncertainty and the darkness of not knowing?
Write about an experience of being in the dark and/or go for a night walk and write about that. What’s within the range of your perception? What thoughts and feelings come up?
Staying with this experience, go beyond what you can see. Where does your imagination take you? Who’s there? What blooms and sings?
Join the monthly Depth-Writing Pod on Monday January 13th, 7pm-8.15pm GMT
Press pause on the busyness of life, connect with others and, most importantly, have time just for yourself to write in response to this month’s prompts. You are don’t need any writing experience to join and there will be no pressure to read anything out. All you need is a spirit of adventure and curiosity!
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N.B. Although depth-writing is therapeutic, it’s not therapy, so let the words lead but only as far as want to go.
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