Many people fear the dark. There's an instinctive heightening of awareness, however brief, once the lights are turned out. Darkness is seen as evil, bad, nasty, and negative.
Or is it?
"Walk in the Light", "Invoke the White Light", "Healing Light", "Positive Energies" are all used and sent daily by many. Because, as everyone knows, Light is good, positive, beneficial and straight from God.
And again, is it really?
My view of the Darkness changed a number of years ago. It was around 2003, and the world was experiencing a lunar eclipse. I decided to enter this realm of darkness through ritual and explore it while our Lady Moon was hidden within the shroud of mystery.
As I lived in a loft at that time, it was very dark there indeed. To symbolize the growing darkness, I sat down in the middle of the room, blindfolded myself and drew a black hood over my head. Thus deprived of sight and light, I entered into a deep meditative state to ride the Moon into darkness.
Within minutes I felt as though I was riding a current through a void. Gradually the current was made manifest beneath me as a gentle silver path. As I made it out, other such silver paths appeared on either side of me, above and below me, as far as the eye could see! And each path was alive - alive! - with every possible, conceivable answer to every possible, conceivable question. Like darting fireflies, these "energies" would grow dense in some parts and thin out as they vanished elsewhere to become manifest in another reality.
Darkness was alive, brimming with its own life, full of purpose and simply waiting to be tapped into! And it was not "dark" as we think dark is - blackness without relief - but illuminated with it's own spirit.
It was the most intense, powerful and beautiful ride I have ever experienced! To me now, darkness is the holder of all answers, and is something that is not to be feared or avoided. A couple of years later, another step was taken into the exploration of the Dark - I was led to explore the attributes of the Dark Goddesses during the Dark of Moon time of the month.
All that year I laboured with this new venture. Each month I would research and align myself with a Goddess, and culminate the month with a ritual during Dark of Moon. Hekate, Pandora, Hel, Nemises, Carridwin, Morgane, Sedna, Baba Yaga and the Dark Madonna were among the Goddesses that I worked with. The Crone, the Aged Wise One began to reveal Herself to me and I began to pay more attention to the time of the waning to New Moon.
Each Goddess taught me different things. Each month I was initiated in deeper mysteries. I learned to see the Dark Moon as a time of healing, of rest and of peace. Just like our day is divided into light and dark, day and night, so the bigger circle of the month takes us from light to dark and to light again.
Some time in there it occurred to me that there was a problem with people who see the world and life only in terms of "white and black". I visualized the world all in that way and saw something stark and glaring, with no definition or perspective. Where there were shadows, they appeared as pools of utter black that swallowed up everything that touched them. White was so blinding that it washed everything out in its glare.
Now, I began to put in shades of gray, and suddenly the world sprang into aliveness. Shadows became infinate in their hues of gray. White began to have details, darkness was less ultimate. There are now places of rest as well as high energy. There is balance.
In my travels into the Dark, I only found blessings, peace and rest. The old attitudes died a natural death and new ideas were born. Balance took on a new meaning.
And I was no longer afraid.
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