It’s early in the morning, and it’s completely dark. I’m sitting in my office, which has 3 large windows looking Southwest over the Hillsdale neighborhood of Portland.

On summer evenings, these windows frame Maxfield Parrish pink skies.  But right now, they are reflecting my domestic scene, as the sky has not even begun to lighten.

In the Dark

Sometimes we enter into a long night of work, of illness, of grief, of the unknown. We may be enjoying a summer evening, and then the long night creeps up.

It seems to span on forever. This darkness. Time and distance are not recognizable. The long night.

We might feel forgotten in the dark.

We’re not. We’re not forgotten there. We’re there to feel our way through. We’re there to have our other senses take a back seat, as we breathe in the darkness.

The Hardest Part

A friend of mine, who was in a long night, said, “It’d be fine if I knew when this dark time to end. I thought, for sure, I’d be out of it in a year. And now I’m going on two. It’s the not knowing how long I have to endure, that’s the hard part.”

Yes. It is.

My Own Long Night

I was going through my own long night. My brother sent me a card with this quote by Rainier Maria Rilke.

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.

Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way in the answer. – From Letters to a Young Poet, 1903

And this is the point of the darkness. The point of the darkness is to live everything.  It’s to recognize those unresolved feelings and to not avoid them. To explore the dark with your hands, feeling things that are so obvious in the daytime, but which have numinous edges, and shadows here.

An Example

When I was 8 years old, I suffered a large 2nd and 3rd degree burn on my arm.  For 3 weeks, in the hospital, every day, they washed it. I sat in a whirlpool with a cup of dreft detergent.

The worst part was letting my arm air dry, because the nerves were exposed, and air would wash over my arm, setting it on fire anew.

It hurt so bad. And the only way to get through it was to play with the hurt. That’s all I knew how to do.

I would ask myself, “Yes, it hurts, but what does this hurt feel like? It’s sharp. Is it sharp like a knife? Is it burny?” I would get down to the very essence of the pain. I would show the pain I understood it, and as soon as it realized I understood, it wasn’t so bad.

It is the same with the dark. When you understand this foreign country, when you express its language back to it, it becomes a companion on your journey.

The darkness is like the Ghost of Christmas Present. Come in, so that you may know it better.

Much love to you on your journey today. Whether it be in dark times or light.

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Welcome to the new website, by the way!