Can darkness be trusted?

On descending to the underworld

Dear reader,

It is funny how shameful we make sadness. Or grief. Or anxiety. These innately human experiences are pariahs to the social order, especially the patriarchal capitalist order of machine-like productivity and forward momentum.

from a walk on a day of hooky

I notice in myself, when in the depths of some kind of darkness, an urge to shutter away. I am the masculine force locking my feminine hysteria in an attic. It seems the socially responsible thing to apologize for my tears, my negativity, my fears. The darkness causes discomfort, worry, and helplessness in those who love me, which deepens my guilt.

Yet spiritually, darkness is trusted.

St. John of the Cross writes of the “dark night of the soul” - a stage of lostness, helplessness, and withdrawal of God’s comforting presence. He postures that this stage, the one in which God feels utterly absent, can paradoxically be the final initiation into complete union with God.

In myth, death is followed by rebirth.

The ending of something - externally or internally - is a sacred doorway to transformation.

In Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey, the heroine inevitably faces a descent. A journey into the underworld. The descent begins with a life-changing loss. For me: a cross-country move, a job-change, a job-quitting, and a miscarriage. Four losses in a short span of five months.

“The journey to the underworld is filled with confusion, grief, alienation and disillusion, rage and despair,” Murdock writes, the first voice to convince me I may not be crazy. My attic may be my sanctuary. My dismemberment may be a sacred commencement into a new way of being.

“In the underworld there is no sense of time; time is endless and you cannot rush your stay. There is no morning, day, or night. It is densely dark and unforgiving. This all-pervasive blackness is moist, cold, and bone-chilling. There are no easy answers in the underworld; there is no quick way out. Silence pervades when the wailing ceases. One is naked and walks on the bones of the dead.

To the outside world a woman who has begun her descent is preoccupied, sad, and inaccessible. Her tears often have no name but they are ever-present, whether she cries or not. She cannot be comforted; she feels abandoned. She forgets things; she chooses not to see friends. She curls up in a ball on the couch or refuses to come out of her room. She digs in the earth or walks in the woods. The mud and the trees become her companions. She enters a period of voluntary isolation, seen by her family and friends as a loss of her senses.”

I am trying, in this journey to the underworld, not to pre-emptively claw myself out, not to launch myself into some kind of false reprieve. Anxiety pushes me to search for jobs, hoping to find some fictional gold mine that will provide me purpose, balance, and financial security. I debate getting back on meds to ease the pain. These temptations want the same thing as my external world wants: a quick fix. But the transformation that needs to happen is likely something internal, not external. As Murdock says, “the spiritual experience for women is one of moving more deeply into self rather than out of self.”

To all who have descended into the darkness, to all who are here with me now: thank you for your courage. Thank you for crying with the drums of the powwow while witnessing those whose ancestors’ feet had been chopped off for dancing dancing.

Until our return.

With love,

A

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The Creative Common Room

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Missy

My friend Raghav’s debut novel Missy is hot off the presses. My copy arrived last week and it is GORGEOUS. I cannot wait to read it and you should read it, too.