I was thankful this morning for the illumination of darkness; for it is so, sometimes.
Darkness lights the path.
I don’t wish to make darkness my teacher, because that isn’t quite the relationship.
Though maybe it is, and I protest too much, for despite the absence of a mortar board and chalk, it does reveal a great deal.
And what it reveals is old patterns of reaction inside me which perhaps I thought I’d left behind.
When the darkness comes, in whatever form, and security and hope seem to leave, in the vacuum – old voices appear.
I sort-of know they are lies, we’ve spoken with each other in the past.
Yet in the darkness, these old voices are loud and they are strong; they invite me to trust them as quietly – or sometimes noisily – they ransack my home.
Darkness illumines as the old voices return. I see them again, in all their useless power.
Perhaps I imagined them gone, thought myself super-well, but life isn’t quite like that.
Things do hang around beneath old sacks in our psyche.
But caught in the brightness of the dark; caught like dismal thieves in a search light, I see them now.
I see them.
And choose, on this occasion, not to listen. Instead, I go for a walk and feel my feet in the snow.
It’s a way back to the light.
