We’re nearing the final stretch of February, the longest month of the year for many here in the Midwestern USA, where a bright white blanket of snow belies the underlying deep, deep dark. A fertile dark where the makings of a resplendent Spring are already underway, bulbs and blooms, rhizomes and saplings and every species of moss all destined for an immensity of green teeming with vitality and aliveness, none of which would be possible without the irrepressible nourishment and unshakable sustenance and stillness of a deep, deep dark.
All that we are, or ever hope to be, began in a dark place. Darkness is our first reality.
No mud. No lotus. ~James Crews
Awareness itself, the full light of consciousness containing all that we see, feel, and know, has its suckling roots in the enveloping darkness of the unconscious. Carl Jung recognized the unconscious as a container for the deepest mysteries and the fullest wisdom of our shared collective ancestral heritage, a chorus of knowing that’s singing us onward and outward, upward and forward. Seen in this way, each one of us carries an incubating life force that’s inextricably connected to, and even propelled by, the collective energies of those life forces that came before us, making contact with us in the depths of our sleep, in the deep dark of our dreams.
You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!-
powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in night.
~You, Darkness, Rainer Maria Rilke
Today’s climate, with its 24-hour news cycles, stores-that-never-close, lights-always-on-all-the-time, gives dark a bad rap. The necessary dark of fertile inwardness, it turns out, isn’t great for consumerism and commerce. Nature herself is conspiring to turn the lights on—here in the Midwest, we’ve already lost almost 2 hours of daily darkness since the Winter Solstice. All the more reason to remember that we carry our winters within us, that the womb of our connection to our possibilities and potentials is always available if only we’re able, from time to time, to extricate ourselves from all that would have us forgetting that our connection to this nurturing place isn’t contingent on the season, or a Prime membership. It rides on us remembering and then turning our attention inward, befriending again and again, that deep, deep dark.
Everything vanishes around me, and works are born, as if out of the void. Ripe, graphic fruits fall off. My hand has become the obedient instrument of a remote will. ~Paul Klee
Photo: Fish Magic, Paul Klee (1925), Philadelphia Museum of Art
THE WELL WITHIN WORKSHOP 