Some days, it feels like the light has left the world.
Darkness.
I notice it in the air.
In the quiet moments between breathing.
In whispers of strangers and the moaning rumble of daily tasks.
A feeling that says, ‘This long winter’s night will not end. The light will not come.’
Where darkness lives
I’ve seen it on the news and in people’s social media soliloquies. It starts with people and percolates through us—like a virus of spirit—a cancer of imagination. And we are in the midst of an epidemic of sorts.
It seems everywhere—a heavy, sedate sensation pulsing with rot.
We can recognize its sickly void as:
A tightness in the chest that prevents love
A lump in the throat that prevents song
A pit in the stomach that prevents deep feeling
Darkness finds where the light is and eats with its peptic goo until there is only a cryptic fog.
It feels hard to avoid.
What separates darkness from our old wounds is that it feels out in the world as much as within us.
It’s not urgent or unnerving, but hopeless. Boring, almost mildewy. Macabre and slow.
How darkness spreads?
The danger of darkness is that it spreads between us and, as it moves, remakes the world in its image.
A feeling becomes a shadow cast over our tired kingdom—a somber ache girdled with a broken back.
If consumed by darkness, we become its emissary, forging its plump defeat. We add to its cauldron of hunger and create a terrible vision of our promised future.
The danger of this darkness is that we not only become consumed by it but also become its soldiers, spreading harm and stepping on light wherever we go.
You can see this in people who have been so defeated that they aim to defeat others—in people who curse flowers and kick moss.
They have suffered a grave defeat at the hands of life, and now they aim to put the life around them to rest.
They have become sentinels of darkness, not through malice but pain— not realizing their subsumption is causing more darkness in the balance.
“We have only one moral responsibility: to recover the peace within and radiate it into our troubled world.”
― Etty Hillesum
Something worth saying
I’m a sensitive person, so I feel the darkness when I wake up—a collective cry in the bowels of the world. I sometimes struggle to reply with anything worth saying.
It’s easy to feel a groan of ‘leave me alone’ or join in the bleak shriek.
But the world doesn’t need another body in the dogpile; it needs an open window to the azure sky— a bright relief of crisp spring air.
Light
If we can move through this collective sulphur, we can find the lotus in the mud—become the lotus in the mud.
We can subvert darkness and shine a light for others. Be the ones giving peace to the listless phantoms of pain who walk among us.
We can be the light by finding it within the darkness.
If we navigate this darkness with tender hearts, we can overpower the warmongers, outsmart the virus of 'security’, and sit cross-legged under the bodhi tree, watching sacred figs drop to our feet.
We will find paradise in the desert of the world.
How?
How can we become impervious to a growing mist of quiet malice?
Missteps
Most who swim in darkness shiver in anger and say, ‘It’s reality; it’s the way the world is. I’m not going to turn away from it.’
They believe everything is darkness, so to find the light is to live in delusion, another sort of darkness.
But to only find darkness in a vast rejoicing world is to delude ourselves and call it responsibility—to strand ourselves on a desert island and refuse to swim or spear a fish.
Others sink into the murky waters, proclaiming in limp defeat, ‘Why bother. It’s all a mess anyway.’ They only find solace in shallow pleasure and meander in quagmires of nihilism.
Many more ignore the presence of darkness, numbing themselves in games of money, power, and status.
They get so busy that they hardly see the boats burning. This is a path of empty toiling.
What we fight for in soft hands and empty hearts remains at the shore when our ships cast off.
We can’t bring it with us. We can only take our minds, and like the over-tilled soil, an endlessly busy mind is a spirit unknown to itself, barren in its use.
The truth
We can’t solve the world's darkness by eating its tatters or turning towards lesser evils. We can only dissolve its pithy shadow with the truth.
And the truth is not a corridor of dim horizons but an unfenced valley vivid in the ashes of self.
The truth is: