Since we last met, I’ve been noodling with names—specifically the name of this newsletter. As I have mentioned, I am fond of titles. Which can lead to a newsletter having an identity crisis on the regular. At some point, I may have thought writing on Substack would lead to gobs of readers, and it may yet, though that is highly improbable when the title evolves with the change of seasons. There are many rules in the social media realm, and one of them includes consistent branding and rarely, if ever, RE-branding.
For my purposes, Substack will be a change-ling, and dear reader, if you choose to continue wandering this unmapped terrain with me, the exercise might lead to oddly titled emails arriving from a subscription that used to be named something else. I find it creatively vital to allow my inner changelings—children replaced with faeries by goblins—to play with the formation and destruction of words. My “oh well” apologies are everlasting.
In alignment with my inner faeries, we’re currently exploring how a myopic relationship with light doesn’t provide the necessary tools to access the kaleidoscope of color that exists on Earth. Antiseptic, bright sterilizers turn the vibrant cascade of life into a piece of dry Texas toast. The many shades of brown in the soil cannot be imagined without the dark, peaty, and dank muck that sticks to the bottom of my boots while digging out the indignant roots of a box elder tree. Focusing only on ordinary days leaves out mysterious nights and undervalues the complexity of living.
People are not good or bad, light or dark, nice or mean, generous or harmful. There is a vast and unruly landscape in each organism, and that is difficult to comprehend within an antiseptic version of light. A light-only perusal of our experience becomes a stark and sterile doctor’s office with periodicals from the 1970s. Patients are known by what is typed into an intake form—flat, lifeless, and without context. By not digging into the muck on our boots, it is impossible to diagnose or know who people are. Asking for details in this hyper-lit environment provides “I’m fine,” or a volume of symptomology with little ability to see the layered resilience and wounded decay from our lived experience.
For much of the last several years, I have been investigating the darkness of my existence. As a grumbly counterpoint (I argue regularly with myself), I decided to double-check my dark-light math. With “coincidentally-odd” timing, I recently engaged a daytime and a nighttime therapist. It’s fascinating how each therapeutic approach has been categorically aligned.
I believe the goblins have been tossing motivational curiosities.
In Waking Up To The Dark, author Clark Strand writes of the universe showcased in a night sky. The focus of humans tends to lean into the gorgeous illumination of the stars, as depicted in a NASA photo of the Carina Nebula.
Strand writes:
“The Earth, the Sun, the Moon: all have ancestors. Even our universe—the mother of a hundred billion galaxies—must surely have had a mother and father of her own…but to grasp even a small part of this…involves ways of knowing that rarely venture into the light. The dead are in the dark.”
“The dead are in the dark.”
Humans are fiendishly addicted to the future. This maniacal fanaticism intentionally misses the crater we attempt to leap across that is filled with the stories of our deadly moments. Lighting up the crater is a gutless hope for an imagined grace that may be found in avoidance.
What’s easy to miss in a quick perusal of a NASA photo depicting a nebula is the enormity of the darkness showcasing blips of light. This is an easy metaphor for the lived experience. The light is shockingly gorgeous and surrounded by an inky, discarded darkness. When I flip my noticing and take in the value of the discarded darkness, I am enraptured with the unheard stories I sense in the midnight universe.
At fourteen, I wore two POW bracelets commemorating soldiers missing in Vietnam. I was a passionate and combative pacifist. It could be said that I’ve been a contradiction my whole life. My understanding of the war had been built on images I saw in magazines I had access to at the local library. In my childhood home, there was a book with graphic photos from the two world wars. The book was on a shelf and easily accessible. During adolescence and up into my teens, there were drills to hide under school desks to survive a nuclear bomb. In that period, I was also witnessing and experiencing abuse and the immediate application of frosting to “help the medicine go down” (R. Sherman, Walt Disney, 1964).
In Clark Strand’s words relating to the Lotus Sutra:
“…the lotus is a beautiful white flower that opens in the light at the surface of a pond, though its roots lie deep in the mud and muck below. No mud, no lotus.”
Stars have been given more attention—the gummed and scuffed versions of actors' names on obscure streets in Hollywood. The amount of expense and time spent to illuminate something that remains unimportant and forgotten, compared to the lack of resilient attention given to the array of dysfunctions threatening all life on our beautiful planet, is something to behold.
It is impossible to predict what the faeries and I might discover during our dark journeys with the nighttime therapist or how those understandings could impact illuminative experiences with the daytime therapist. What I imagine is that there may be a potential for developing a sturdiness in my root structure and an ability to absorb the nutrients that come from the sun due to an equal understanding of the importance of the mud and muck of my origination.
The dark and light are the casing and medium for a spectrum within a kaleidoscope. Without either, a nebula does not exist. With both, night blooms may be possible. The aptly named, fear-inducing, and gorgeous “Tarantula Nebula”:
I end with the words of Leslie Barnard Booth, from the book A Stone Is A Story:
A stone is not just a stone.
A stone is a story.
A stone has been magma, oozing under Earth’s crust.
A stone has been lava, gushing from the mouth of a volcano.
A stone has been wrenched apart by roots.
Crushed and dragged by a glacier.
Swept up in the foam of a rushing river.
Molded.
Carved.
Ground down to a speck of sand and sent to sea.
There it has waited for millions of years.
Bits of seaweed and shell and bone have piled on top of it, have become a part of it.
A stone has felt the slow drifting, the slow shifting of the surface of the earth.
A stone has been driven down, down, down, into deep searing darkness.
Squeezed and scorched, it has transformed.
Eras have passed.
Ages have flown.
The dinosaurs have come and gone.
Cave lions have prowled, Mammoths have grazed.
The first humans have made the first music.
And a stone?
Thrust upward, skyward, a stone has risen high into the heart of a mountain—
A mountain whittled by wind, by rain, by ice, by time.
A stone has been a ledge on the edge of a cliff.
A stone has been scuffed and scraped.
A stone has slipped, tumbled, crumbled, crashed.
And on that day…
Maybe you find a stone.
You might pick it up.
You might turn it in your hand.
You might see the parts of the stone that were once lava
That were once sand.
That were once bone.
You might start to imagine everything the stone has been…
And all it might become.
The beautifully illustrated book may be found HERE.
I send you care and resilience as we wander the Earth during the same timeline.
Illuminations:
Booth, L., 2023. A stone is a story. Simon & Schuster, Margaret K. McElderry Books. New York, NY.