"Hello Darkness My Old Friend" - Reflecting on Winter Solstice
by, Anisha Zo Kuhn, December 21, 2023
Paul Simon wrote “The Sound of Silence”, when he was twenty-one years old. He was feeling an inner “darkness”, an out of sorts-ness. He picked up his guitar and took his inner darkness to the bathroom. He liked to be with his music there. He liked the echo of the sound off the tile. He turned on the water and let the sound of its flow join the music. He kept the lights off and started to play. That night, embracing his dark emotions and his discomfort, facing them with his creativity, the song, “the sound of silence”, was born.
What do we do with the long dark nights within our inner worlds? What do we do with overwhelming, uncomfortable feelings? What do we do with emotional pain? What do we do with overwhelming anxiety? What do we do with tough circumstances, with mighty challenges, with the pain of loss and grief? What do we do with self-doubt, with struggling to find where we fit in the world? What do we do with our anger, our feelings of unfairness and injustice? What do we do with our personal inner winter solstices, our personal long dark nights?
As Americans in 2023, there is a good chance, that as soon as tough circumstances and painful emotions hit, we seek escape…we may turn to mind- and mood-altering substances to take the tough feelings from us… We may find ourselves looking for emotional comfort in the pantry or refrigerator. We may find ourselves shopping. We may escape our dark nights and overwhelming feelings by leaping into other worlds in video games or in religious/spiritual bliss. We may sink our heads and escape our feelings, our challenging, painful situation, into our work, in busyness, or in sex. We may freeze and pull the covers over our head and take ourselves out of life to avoid the dark nights and painful feelings. We may go outward and escape in a constant social life. There are so many ways to run from darkness.
Pain and struggle are a part of every life, as night and darkness are a part of every 24 hours, and the cold and dark of winter are a part of each and every year. As I reflected on creating this celebration, I learned that the focus of many winter solstice celebrations is the shifting of the Earth that follows this darkest night and begins to bring more light, lengthening daylight, assuring us that spring will come.
As I sat with thoughts of upcoming Spring, I thought, yes, how important it is for us to celebrate the coming of more and more light. How important it is for us to remember, to truly know, that light always follows darkness, that spring always follows winter, bringing sunshine, warmth and new life. We are celebrating the coming of light tonight…the hope of light and spring, but if we keep our celebration to this, we are missing something essential to the wholeness of winter solstice… essential to the wholeness of our human experience of life on Earth. We are forgetting to be with, to embrace, to celebrate the spaces within light. In outer nature this is the space between days, the space between autumn and spring. In our inner world, these are the spaces between metaphoric “sunbathing”, joys, contentment, personal growth and accomplishments. If we skip to the celebration of future light, we are escaping what is, right now, the darkness.
New-thought theologian and spiritual teacher, Mathew Fox, writes, “Silence is to sound as darkness is to light. In the West we tend to honor sound and light at the expense of silence and darkness. But my understanding is that the Big Bang was no bang at all, that it was utterly silent at that time, that there was no noise and, as Rupert (Sheldrake) says, no light; yet there was a burning.” (Fox, 2019)
Yes, darkness and silence can hold burnings, the beginnings of ideas, thought connections, creations, wonder, perceptions, and new life. Creation begins in the dark, whether the dark of the soil of Earth, a womb, or the dark of our deep inner world… The ember heats, the seed breaks open, a human takes form, a soul awakens.
The spaces of darkness, if we listen, call us to rest, to tuck in, to sleep, to restore. In the spaces of darkness our inner soulful worlds call us. If we let go and allow ourselves to fully inhabit the spaces between light…we will find within them our portals to personal growth, and spiritual expansion. If we keep letting go, all the way to surrender, allowing ourselves to free fall into the depths of what is, we find in our depths, our Divinity.
Oh, but it isn’t easy to be in the experience of pain and discomfort. It isn’t easy to trust the unknown and uncertainty of dark times and experiences. How do we do it, how do we not flee the dark? How do we muster the courage to let go and take one step at a time through our darkness?
Perhaps Ram Dass had the answer as to how to deal with the pain that comes with being human. “I get in my witness, which is down in my spiritual heart. The witness that witnesses being. Then those particular thoughts that are painful – love them. I love them to death!“ Ram Dass always makes me smile. Can we have unconditional love for all of life? Can we love the darkness in our lives as much as the light? Can we love our human pain and struggle (not like) accept it as a part of nature, a part of life?
My definition of faith has become the trust I have in finding light within darkness. I came to know this light in my deepest darkness, my son’s suicide. I remember the day after he died, choosing to be present, to grieve, to feel. I remember deciding consciously that I wanted to step out of denial and be present to my son’s reality that led to his suicide. I did not run from my grief, I let it envelope me.
I did this because I knew, the moment I learned of his suicide, that I failed his living being, by avoiding his darkness; by my fear of his darkness. I didn’t have the courage to be with him in it.
Since his passing I have gone into every memory when I know I failed him, when I wasn’t there for him, when I said something that didn’t help him at all, because I avoided going deep into the darkness of what he was sharing. When I visit one of these memories, I tell him what I would tell him now, with what I’ve come to know. I express my love into the darkness of what he was going through.
I can do this now, because I have spent the past dozen years since his suicide, facing my inner shadows, facing and healing my own darkness. When we face our own personal and inner darkness, when we stop judging human challenges or our inner limits and difficult emotions, we stop judging the darkness of others. When we learn how to navigate our own inner darkness, to love it, to trust there is divine light within it, we no longer fear the darkness of others, and we can journey with them, helping empower them to take their own healing journey through their inner world to their own Divinity.
In knowing one’s darkness, facing one’s struggles and the dark corners of one’s inner world…the contrast enables us to see our light, to know our light, our strengths, our virtues…and we can love ourselves as we are, others as they are, and make peace with life as it is. This is unconditional love… Divine love…which always irradicates darkness…
Tonight, on this second longest night of the year, may we love the darkness to light, may we allow for the natural spaces within Light, the darkness. May we allow it’s contrast to help us see and know the Light. The next time a tough problem arises in our lives, or painful emotions, may we look to the young Paul Simon, and greet the darkness with something like, “Hello Darkness my Old Friend”. May we remember Ram Dass’s way, of loving pain to death, and find a warm safe place within us, to live through the darkness, to heal through the darkness, to bring our consciousness and even our love to the darkness, with faith that Light is always within it. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5). ”
Resources:
So Much is Positive in the Holy Darkness, (2019). Fox, M.
https://dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org/2019/09/15/so-much-is-positive-in-the-holy-darkness/
UpJourney, Ram Dass quotes, (2019).