Darkness Calls You
How does the darkness call you, dear one?
Are you being beckoned to rest? Is your grief welling up asking to be released in a shower of tears or some deep soul wailing?
Perhaps it is a time for remembrance and reflection as we come to the last few months of this year.
Maybe you are feeling the pull to surrender into Mystery, to be held by the Unknown, Unnamable Source of all that is, was and is yet to be.
For me, I am feeling the call to tend to my grief. To turn off the lights and sit in the darkness of my unanswered questions. This is not to wallow, but to make space. To tend to that which is stirring in my soul.
Tomorrow is All Hallow’s Eve, the eve of the church’s holy day remembering the dead, born of an even more ancient Celtic tradition known as Samhain (pronounced Sow-wen). Samhain is a cross-quarter day marking the midpoint between fall equinox and winter solstice. It ushers us into the darkest months of the year.
Tomorrow is also the 18th anniversary of the death of my younger brother Nathan. He died in a violent accident at 18 years of age. And so this anniversary feels particularly strange and painful. He has been dead now as long as he was alive. For my family, Samhain marks another, awful kind of midpoint.
And so my grief rises. And so I welcome it.
There was a good few years when I didn’t know how to welcome my grief. I was afraid it would swallow me whole. I was afraid I would be forever stuck in the pit if I allowed myself the decent. And so, for a long time, I did not go there.
Yet, grief is not an ending. Rather it is the medicine of healing. It is the path of transformation. It is how we alchemize our loss to integrate and include the trauma of what has happened into our story of self.
Grief is born out of love. And because I love my brother still, I grieve him still. My grief is no longer as consuming as it once was. But it is a regular guest in my life.
Like the wheel of the year that takes us through repeating patterns of spring and summer, winter and fall, grief too is cyclical. We return again and again to the landscape of our loss and our love. And each time, we heal another layer. We tend to another wound. We grieve our way to wholeness.
The death of my brother was my initiation into Mystery. Today, I feel those unanswerable questions rising up again…why? Why me? Why the pain? Why the suffering? Why the heartache?
No answers come. 18 years later, they still ring out into the Mystery.
Loss unravels us. Strips us naked. Exposes us to the harsh elements. Takes us to the end of our own understanding. And somehow, in that terrifying nakedness, I have experienced that surrendering into the darkness is surrendering into love.
So dear heart, may you make space for whatever the darkness of these late autumn nights is calling you into. May you honor what is alive for you even when it feels like death. And may you move towards the Mystery that calls.
I leave you with a poem I wrote this year about the death of my brother:
“True”
I used to think that truth
was a stone I could hold in my hand
comforted by its weight and solidity
I would turn it over and over
polishing it with my attention
truth grounded me when I felt
I might fly away with the wind
truth protected me; a weapon
I could hurl with the strength of my own arm
I could aim truth at the forehead of the giant
and be the victor
but the broken body of my brother
and our mother’s piercing anguish
tore the sky open
and the earth swallowed me
flailing into darkness
the polished stone slipped from my fingers
falling
falling
all was stripped away
with nails and fists and accusations
I resisted the decent
grief broke through like a strangled bird
flapping wounded wings
the darkness swelled with blood and feathers
then exhaustion came
and I surrendered to the sleep of death
when I awoke, seemingly years later,
the darkness was swimming with stars
trillions of blazing bodies held in the cradle of night
and one truth surfaced in that infinite expanse
in the Mystery before me, vast and wild,
I too was held
