The lights are always on. The Christmas tree outside the shopping mall, the laptop on my desk. But tonight I will leave the lights out and visit the darkness. Even the moon won’t show her face this night.
Darkness.
An uncomfortable word. A word waiting for Light. Away with the darkness of our ignorance and evil. The Enlightenment has taught us to think. But rational, level-headed people don’t understand that reality can be too much for a person. They don’t remember how they grew in the dark womb.
Try to leave the lights out.
Without a screen to watch the relentless world news on, you can forget it for a moment. When you’re not chasing solutions, you can stop for a moment. When it gets light again, what do you want to see? What kind of world do you want to live in? Reflecting on your wishes and desires is what people traditionally did during the new moon.
Maybe you will hear soft music. The “song of love that leads us out of the maze“1, the “song of longing for another land“2. Let it grow in you. Leave the TV off for a while. A seed needs time to germinate and slowly push itself upwards. Gently it spreads its roots through the dark soil.
Once above the ground, in “reality”, your dream seems puny; a seedling that can be pulled out in a blink. But look around you. One by one the green shoots emerge. A sea of longing, a mighty forest. With our intentions as a guide, we can change the world3.
It grows in the dark. It starts with the question, “What do I want?” “What does God want?” “What does the earth want?”, like Eisenstein writes.1 This coming night the moon is dark. A good time to go and meet our longings.
For the inspiration for this post I want to thank P. for telling us about Joanna Macy and Active Hope. He is one of our future co-residents in Zuiderveld.
Footnotes
- Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story (2018)
- This is from a Dutch children’s song.
- This is from a book that I haven’t read yet: Joanna Macy, Active Hope (2016)
- In the Netherlands, (a lot of) the lights go out for one night per year: The Nacht van de Nacht.