Into the Darkness

Into the darkness…

It was 3:45am

I startled awake. 

I startled awake to someone calling my name. It was a sharp calling. It was a demanding and forceful “Get up now!” voice. 

I am listening. 

Tell me what you want.

Darkness was the only reply. I got up and went out into that darkness, the same darkness I feared as a child but that I have now fallen into a deep loving relationship with. 

It’s never dark enough anymore. 

I miss the deep darkness I used to know as a child. That darkness that has been driven away by so much light pollution. Mankind drove away the dark and the silence. How does he expect now to know the Divine? 

How does he expect to encounter his own… soul. 

“I am here waiting for you” 

I can see her, deep within that “other sight” 

She is beautiful and terrifying. She is familiar and inhuman. 

I see her standing in the deep and dark woods, cloaked in white and beckoning without a voice from her lips. Her white garments set against the darkness, deeper than it can exist in my world. There in her secret woods she beckoned me. She had something for me, perhaps a box of wisdom or a box of mystery. Perhaps a dagger for my very soul or beauty that would forever blind me. My mind wonders. 

“We have important things to share.”

I have only the urgency to find you and no course. No map. No series of instructions. Only the beckoning within me. 

And so it must be that I plot my course into the woods in search of a doorway to her that I may find the understanding I seek. The completion of this vision that haunts and compels me so. 

Its cold and the mist is thick. I grab my lantern and make my way down a small game path into the dark woods. 

There is a light breeze at the tree tops that causes them to whisper as they sway against the stars too numerous to imagine. The spotted white bark is less busy easy to see as the darkness folds in on me. The occasional owl watches me silently from above. I wonder what they are.

I look up and the stars…. oh the stars… once bright enough to light my way are now obscured almost entirely by the tree tops. 

I find myself stumbling in the dark landscape. Falling repeatedly to the rocky forest floor cutting my hands and knees. I think of his three falls to his knees on his journey up mt Calvary and I wonder if the dampness below my fingertips is his tears or his blood. This sacred space that I am both called to and guided through. I pray that I am not the intruder here. 

A breeze brushes my cheek, a dark caress to let me know I am welcome here. 

Its her, in the breeze. The cool air stings against my cuts and there is a deep coldness that aches deep within my bones. So much pain on this journey but she is in the trees and in the rocks beneath my feet. Her voice beckons me in the beating of my heart and the blood rushing in my eardrums. Somehow that is enough. 

“I am here waiting for you.” 

I hear her voice once again and I whisper “ I am coming, but it’s hard, I hurt so much.”

The cold flows through the marrow of my bones and every step is an act of determination cloaked in raw pain. I ask humbly for her patience with me as this world is both familiar and new to me. 

A knowing comes to me, a voice deep within and yet from a distant location. I know now to turn my lantern down and let the flame die out. I place the lantern on the ground shrouded in darkness and leave it behind. 

I am now surrounded by owls. They are calling to each other in secret sacred communications that are not for me. They are beyond me and yet in some strange way they comfort me.

I continue upon the rocky forested path into what is now a void of everything.  Deeper than shadow or night. Even the earth below my feet vanishes.

When was it that I stopped seeing even the trees? 

I wave my hand in front of my face and it too has vanished completely. In this darkness I have lost even my self. That body I have known since birth.  One step at a time I have become one with the darkness. Even the pain is more a memory than a feeling now.

“I am here waiting for you.” 

It has been hours, or decades maybe. Perhaps a lifetime. Kingdoms could have risen and now fallen as I move silently in this darkness pulled only by her voice. 

Am I even moving? 

Am I even I? 

The dark is all I know now, my own self is now a distant memory. 

Something shifts. 

I don’t look into the darkness as I have no eyes with which to see. Rather, I know in some other way that the dark is now fading. 

An explosion of something beyond color, sound or anything senses could comprehend moves through my faded being. A distant memory of me tumbles away and some new “I” is born from a chrysalis. 

I emerge into a new world. 

“You found me”. 

“I am here and you have found me”

A moment of time passes, or maybe we are beyond time now. 

A new world is now before me and I m no longer I. 

We are. 

We are.

We. 

Beyond that all words fail.

This is what now is. 

We.