Hello Darkness, my old friend
By Lian Brook-Tyler
Getting good with the Dark… with death, with shadow, with the earth, with fear, with blood, with the unknown… is the part of the path that most of us resist the longest.
Oh the light… yes please! Ascension…who wouldn’t?! Floating around in bliss… oooh, don’t mind if I do!
But there comes a point when we need to descend into the Dark, that is if we want to live fully as our truth.
Some of us were plunged into it in a way we didn’t consciously choose (though our souls did), through some kind of break in our usual reality… such as a death, a birth or an accident.
One moment we were skipping around on the surface (or hovering above it if we’re a particularly floaty, dissociative type and/or discovered an ascension path first) and the next, found ourselves falling through a crack into the Dark before we knew what was happening.
Some of us choose to jump into the chasm of an initiation of some kind… such as being alone in the wild for long enough to meet ourselves, consciously grieving, or entering a crucible of deep shadow work… in the way McKenna describes in the final lines of one of my most loved quotes.
“This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”
And those of us who are meant to go to the deepest reaches of our souls find ourselves dancing between being pulled and throwing ourselves into the Dark at different points in our lives.
I would love to say it gets easier each time we descend but the truth is it doesn’t, we just become more able to see the Dark as it truly is and become the one who is powerful enough to submit to it.
We begin to see the Dark as not only as a place of menace and danger but a place of rich possibility and deep meaning.
And on every journey into the Dark we uncover our purest, rarest gold… and become it.
So thank you, Darkness, my friend, my teacher, my beloved.. thank you for everything.
Art: this picture was a gift from a fellow lover of the Dark, Elizabeth Lovius… it takes one to know one.
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