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And for everyone, if you want to partake in a little new year’s group writing project, send me your letter-to-yourself by December 31.
Holiday blessings, all!
I am thinking about darkness.
I am thinking about letting go, letting be.
I am thinking about how much I don’t know when it comes to these things.
Not that I am entirely uninitiated. But mostly, I think I still know nothing about the dark side of the moon.
There was a woman from my childhood, the woman with the quiet way about her and the gentle smile and the shining eyes who surely must have been a nurse or a therapist or some kind of caregiver, one of the women in the world who will never be recognized as the saint that she is. She had three kids back in those days. Today she has none. Last year around this time she lost her eldest, her only daughter, to a stroke.
I am wondering what darkness is, what it actually is, and what it asks of us. Just wondering. This bright morning, I don’t want to know anything more about it than I already do, the darkness that was custom-made for me, that stalks me like a shadow I just barely can’t see until it falls and then I can see nothing at all. It has come before, plenty of times in little ways—the heartbreaks, the heartaches, the tiny tears and tugs—and once, just once I think, in a big way, that summer it came for my whole family and we all went down hard. I’m no stranger to my darkness. We’ve met. And I know—from that big one, and the littles one, too—that the darkness is not my enemy. That it comes bearing gifts like a solemn Santa Claus who hands you a present that shakes and yowls and seems like it might bite you hard if you open it, and this old man, this elder who can fly in the dark, looks you dead in the eyes and says without saying a word, “Yes, it is going to hurt at first, but hang in there, stay with it, and it will become something beautiful, something powerful, something you’ll be able to help others with someday,” and you believe him. I know the darkness bestows and bequeaths, festoons and adorns, ripens and deepens and clarifies.
I know all this, but I don’t know know it, not on this bright morning. This morning, the darkness is just an idea I’m writing about, and I’d prefer to keep it that way for now, to walk past my darkness today like I walked past that man in Portland last week with the swollen forehead and the bloodshot eyes asking for help, literally asking, “Will you help me?” I nodded my head diplomatically as if to say say Good luck and God bless but really all I was saying was No.
Is that my darkness? Am I in darkness, unawares?