Traverse the dark places of your life.

The shadows are the beautiful things about us.

Ben took this photo on April 8th, 2024, around 3:30 PM during the solar eclipse. Our backyard was in the path of total visibility. To me, this photo visually depicts what it means to live in both our light and dark places, and to accept both as part of us and as good things.

I entered the near-empty sanctuary, dimly lit, and slid into a pew near the back. It neared seven o’clock in the evening, almost dusk in northern Indiana, and the silence became an echo reverberating around me. I am not used to silence. But I am used to the dark.

When I was a little girl—very, very young—I refused to fall asleep without a nightlight. This happened after I turned three, and I’ve pieced together why: because I was sexually molested by a cousin at a family gathering when I was three. Bedtime, then, became a time when I did not feel safe, because I was alone in the dark and vulnerable. Before my parents left my room after tucking me in, they’d switch on my closet light and leave the door open just a crack.

I slept this way until Ben and I married, when I was twenty-six.

At that point, Ben and I shared a bedroom every single night, and he couldn’t sleep unless it was pitch black in the room. I asked if we could leave the master bathroom light on, and he agreed, but after a few weeks of doing this, it felt silly. I felt like a little kid, like I couldn’t get past this weird feeling of panic at bedtime.

After a while, I told Ben we’d try it his way, and now I cannot sleep unless it is completely dark. We even have room-darkening shades. The absence of light, once like a tomb, now envelops me more like a womb. I feel wrapped in its security.

Exploring darkness is meaningful to me, because it has become a metaphor for my life in many ways. I learned about the dark night of the soul shortly before Felicity was born, that is, a spiritual concept that involves desolation, aridity, grappling. I’ve felt an interior wrestling since I was very young—a tug-and-pull between two polar extremes, two opposing viewpoints or perspectives, two contrary feelings or needs.

And I’ve stumbled over myself and my own viewpoints and perspectives and feelings and needs.

Not long ago, a writer-friend of mine, Mike Sollom, sent me a poem. He did it in response to my questioning and doubt about whether my memoir manuscript was “unremittingly bleak,” as one editor described it. I couldn’t get past that. Was it true? Was it too dark, too heavy, too much? The feelings associated with this possibility were dread, disappointment, and shame.

Am I too much?

I always thought I was. But then Mike offered this poem by Wendell Berry, and my concept of light and dark was, once again, reframed:

TO KNOW THE DARK

To go in the dark with a light is to
know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go
without sight,
and find that the dark, too,
blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and
dark wings.

Sitting in the darkened church with an hour to myself—a full hour to be alone with my thoughts, my hopes and dreams, my grief, my exhaustion—and to surrender all of it somehow, afforded me the chance to reflect on the meaning this poem held for me and my life.

To know what darkness is, you have to traverse through its tunnel, without any way of knowing what’s in front of you or how you’ll find your way out. There is a stark beauty to darkness, especially what can be heard and understood in the silence of night, when the world sleeps and you are invited into solitude.

I’m not sure why I don’t hear God’s voice in the dark. Not in the light, either. I used to. Maybe it’s so I can learn how to be brave, how to venture into these unknown territories of parenting and writing a deeply honest book. Maybe I can find courage to stay a while, maybe explore, and to grow familiar (or at least make peace) with what I find and what I don’t find waiting in the dark places of my psyche and soul.

There is light, and there is also light present in darkness. Obstruction of what’s obvious, that is. Obscurity. A “blind faith” that is not contrived or naive but very, very aware of the terrifying necessity of confronting oneself in the darkness.

What is left to distract or numb a person when she learns to be alone with herself—her thoughts, her dying dreams, her pain? The darkness strips away all extraneous things that pull me away from the deep end of the ocean.

And we are all an ocean: vast, expansive, filled with shadows and crevices.

The light of darkness is to plunge into the deepest waters, to not fear them but welcome the truth exposed to me when I can’t see what’s in front of me and don’t know how far I have to go until I arrive at a place that seems familiar. What is that truth? For me, it is in accepting my humanity, even welcoming it. And that means allowing myself to falter and fail and fall, but then to repair and reconnect and rise.

Not all light illuminates. Some things are shiny but end up pulling us away from the truest parts of ourselves. I am thinking of things like groupthink and politicization and preaching. Light that illuminates can only be unearthed in the silent spaces of stone and soil, where things germinate inside a container that cannot be seen to others, even to ourselves.

I’ve wondered where God is since Sarah was born. I never questioned it before then. Now I see God as Mystery, an abyss of love and mercy that I can’t fully fathom. The dark things can be lovely, too. Mysteries are dark but lovely. So are questions. So is art. There is too much in this thin human life of mine that makes no sense, and this is why, in order to live everything, in order to be fully alive, I have to learn that darkness can be my teacher.

I can befriend darkness, just as I can befriend emptiness. The hollows of my self, my being, create a terrible ache of the heart. But I’ve come to realize it’s because I have this need to fill and be filled at all times, in order to feel safe and secure and loved. I need the security of my nightlight. I need to see in order to believe, in order to do, what appears an impossible feat—like getting my memoir out to the world.

What happens when things are stripped away?

Sitting in the dark church empowered me. I understood in that span of an hour alone, in the silence, that darkness can develop depth in a person. I believe it can also create despair. How do I know which way I will go—depth or despair? For me, it’s in the expectation (not the belief in a faint possibility, which is really doubt) that the Light is with me, that the Light is in me, that I am becoming and unfolding in the caverns and holes.

That maybe my shadows are the beautiful things about me.