into the darkness
to find the light
It was just after midnight and I was on my slow ascent out of the underworld. I had spent the last five hours lying on the floor of the maloca, my body staring at the silver Costa Rican jungle dancing under the indifferent moonlight, while the entirety of my interior was dragged through infinite unfolding dimensions of darkness and unthinkable pain from the plant medicine I had drunk earlier in the evening.
I was surrounded by twelve others who were also in the slow transit of returning to this room from the far reaches of wherever the medicine had taken them in the previous hours. To assist our transition, our guides lit a single candle in the center of the room, piercing the darkness we’d all been sharing, sending a silent orange bloom of warm light to blanket us as we returned one by one, fragile and raw.
To say I had been to hell that night would be to call the Pacific Ocean a puddle. I watched helplessly as a wicked entity moved in to my being, swallowed ‘me’ entirely, and filled out every inch of my body and consciousness with an excruciating pain — a physical torment, one that hissed like snakes and bled into levels of agony and fear I didn’t know existed. It was, in a word, sinister.
As the single candle flickered in the center of this silent space, and people began to stretch and move and slowly sit up, I felt both relief to have the worst of that experience be behind me, but also a growing anger as to why it happened at all. Why was that necessary? What was it for? Honestly what the FUCK was that? There were no whispers of wisdom tucked into the corners, there was no tidy teaching to be understood — it was nothing but a hollow and severely punishing sojourn to the darkest place I’d ever been, a torture of my corporeal plane by a malevolent, menacing presence that I had no choice but to be extremely alert to, to just try to survive, surrender to, and endure.
While my anger fused with grief and confusion and a righteous rage as I tried to make some sense of the experience, my eyes moved around the room to the others who were all emerging from places of similar magnitude… and suddenly, in a flash, I saw it.
A guide stood over someone, arms extended, and helped them to their feet — slowly, attentively. The young man near me who had evidently been on a similarly difficult journey was quietly taken into the arms of his partner, and he held him purposefully, lovingly rocking him back into safety. A hug was had over there, a small chirp of laughter was heard over here, shoulders were touched, smiles were shared, words were softly traded.
In the quiet and tiny exchanges I observed in that candle-lit room, I saw with a sparkling clarity what I still have not been able to unsee anywhere I go, well over a year later: the little ways in which we are all tending preciously to each other, every single day. Glimmers — mini acts of care, small proofs of something significant and immense: our species’ inherent inclination towards love.
I know it would be all too easy to make a case against this. As we look around our world, wars rage, hate is spewed, and heartbreaking acts of neglect and cruelty can be found just about everywhere. Even among those of us who are lucky enough to live in safe homes, in our own spaces or relationships we still might find ample suffering. The holidays, for some, bring increased time with imperfect people who aren’t who we want them to be, who don’t see us the way we hope they would, who say the wrong things and let us down time and again. Or for others, it may be the absence of a someone, as another year turns its page, that lays a heavy grief across the season. As the winter solstice approaches and the nights stretch on for days, we can, without much effort, be swallowed by the darkness and be made to believe it’s all there is.
As I lay on the floor watching this group of mostly strangers get up, quietly check on each other and slowly make their separate ways to bed, tears streamed down my face. I wept from the vehemence of it all, and I sobbed because I immediately understood. The severity of the darkness and pain I had just been put through was instantly and unmistakably matched by its opposing force: displays of tenderness, acts of care, love. But I also wept because somehow, even this love still rang like pain through my body — not quite pain, softer, rounder… a shade of hurt. It felt like sorrow. Sorrow, because I could see just how desperate our hearts are for this love, how much we ache to receive it, how madly we long to give it.
We are all a little bit scared most of the time. Pain has been handed down to us through our ancestors, it has been repackaged and passed from generation to generation in innumerable shapes and forms. Most people in the room that night were there to open the door to their pain, to meet their hurt, to study their darkness. Most people who have lived have been closely engaged with their pain in some form another, whether it be facing it, running from it, numbing it, or taking it out on another. We all carry it within us all the time. It is a part of who we are.
As a sole candle’s flame filled the air with gold and warmed the space between each other, I recognized in an instant that in spite of this pain, or perhaps, precisely because of it, we have all been carried. We have all been carried, by another human, by strangers and loved ones alike, through our days, through our darkness. And in one swift shot it cleaved my heart all the way open and laid it bare. I let the warm light flood my senses, saturate my bones, fill me all the way to the top, and I haven’t seen the world the same, since. How can there be both so much pain and so much love?
Our human bodies are houses for the riot of experience: for horror and anguish, for love and tenderness, for everything in between. That night, I was thrust into a violent collision with the ferocity of both the light and the dark, and one that was conspicuously off balance: having spent five hours writhing in the vile and sinister, it was only perhaps a half hour in the glow of the candle that shattered me into a million fractals of love. A line from Jane Hirshfield’s poem The Weighing surfaced in my mind as a guide gently helped me off the floor and out into the night:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance
Winter solstice is a celebration of the dark, not a rallying against it. This isn’t a story of pushing against the pain, or of trying to escape our darkness. It’s here. It’s within us. It’s all around us. It is, for better or worse, a part of the earth, a part of nature, a part of our life. We are hurting each other all the time, by accident or otherwise — and I don’t know why. These histories of hurt have made it so that many of us fear people above all other things — trusting others, being seen by others, loving others. But no matter what tall tales and fantasy stories we like to tell ourselves, the truth and the paradox of it all is that we cannot do this without each other. We need to carry one another through it, and we need to allow ourselves to be carried just the same. And what a precious and beautiful thing that is to behold.
Love, like hurt, comes in a multitude of languages and forms, and if you’re looking for it, if you’re really paying attention to the spaces in between, you’ll begin to notice it exists everywhere. Sometimes it’s big and sweeping and obvious. But most of the time, it’s just a listening ear, it’s a text message, it’s a wordless you go ahead wave, it’s a sincere ‘how are you?’, it’s a meal lovingly made or a hand softly held or a question earnestly asked, it’s an attentive, quiet, presence. It’s a hand outstretched, a door held, a smile here, a knowing glance there. It’s a small gift, a favor, a passing compliment, an offer extended. These tiny acts of care, whether shared between strangers in the supermarket or among those we’ve known since the beginning, are most often done imperfectly and messily, and can seem paltry and unimportant. But I beg you to not overlook them because they compound to something remarkable: light.
As the longest night of the year pulls us into a collective darkness, and as the various difficulties of the holidays return, and as bombs detonate and the earth burns and a challenging four years are set to soon begin, as I stand in my heartache and pain and watch as sinister forces leave trails of destruction through the lives of so many, as I wonder how we might ever know joy, I look around at the humans and I watch for the abundant and ongoing small acts of tenderness. I watch for the tiny ways we say I love you all day long. I watch for the ways we are all being carried by each other. I watch for the glimmers, I let them consume me, and I strive to mirror them back out into the world.
And it is here, in these infinitesimally small moments, that a flame is lit in the space between us, and the dark chasms of our shared hurt are filled with gold.
xo,
Taylor
What does the winter solstice bring to mind for you? How are you meeting the darkest day of the year? Come leave a comment:
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It took such courage to get to the light. There’s a documentary I saw about Joe Campbell’s work called “Finding Joe” that i think you would find interesting. Thanks for sharing your sacred experience. So beautiful.
Thank you, so beautiful