Today I pulled up this blog for the first time in 7 years, feeling compelled to re-boot the blog now. I’ve been inspired and encouraged by all the artists who are creating and sharing their work during our days of coronavirus uncertainty and quarantine, and was challenged this morning on a Zoom call hosted by Jeff Goins to “share our best work.” I commented in the call’s chat, “I will!” So now that means I have to take action. 🙂
Have you been feeling bluesy during this time? I think many might be. Last November I wrote a piece about the darkness, at a time when I was experiencing a big bout of darkness in my own life. In a sense, I wrote the piece in an effort to write myself right out of the darkness. I have to admit, it helped.
Some of you may know that I’ve been in grad school for two years now, working on a master’s degree in creative writing. I’ve spent most of that time obsessing about my writing not being good enough. I haven’t shared my writing with anyone outside of my program. But this past week, I’ve been nudged to share it — to be as brave as the other artists sharing their work at this time. My hope is that what I’ve written could be a help, an encouraging word, to you and others as well.
Here goes!
EMBRACING THE DARKNESS
New, festive lights hang from every lamppost along the street, just in time for the coming darkness of winter. Holiday lights, I figured, except they weren’t. “Year-round lights,” my neighbor Catherine told me when I spotted her outside the library. A way to light the night no matter what time of year. Because darkness comes all year round, whether its four o’clock in the afternoon or ten o’clock in the night, eventually it comes.
I ran into Catherine when Thanksgiving was just a few days off. She couldn’t talk long, she needed to get home and walk her dog “while it’s still light,” she said. At two o’clock in the afternoon, she was right to worry. Today the sun will set at 4:24 pm. But dusk creeps in before that along the lake where she walks her dog. Long shadows cast themselves against the shore an hour before sunset, and you feel the wind kick up and the lake cool down as you tug at your jacket zipper, pull it up as far as it will go, swaddle your neck in your coat’s fleece-lined warmth. You brace against the cold. But the dark, this you cannot brace against. It swaddles you, willing or not.
The new lights in town, their translucent brilliance beating against a dark universe, blink on at four pm. A stuttering shaft of light, luminous, rises from the strands of lights draped from lamp post to lamp post, buffeted by a small wind. I sit in a bakery, look out the window, and think of a faraway world, of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the mysterious lamp posts that led to a blanket of white snow in a new world they didn’t know existed. We don’t have snow here, but the light strands look magical just the same, and I watch my face in the window, long eyelashes blinking slowly against the darkness, and concentrate on opening my eyes wide enough, often enough, to see the light, believe the light is here. I wish it would snow.
Perched here like a waiting bird, I watch traffic string by, and spy a young family on the sidewalk, toddler in tow. A golden retriever, tethered by a flimsy leash to a metal chair outside the bakery, wags his tail, wants to lick the toddler. He’s bigger than she is, and the parents appear somewhat alarmed by the licking. Instinctively, the mom juts her black leather, fur-lined boots into action, blocking the dog’s path towards her daughter. I wonder if the fur, spilling out of the top of her fur-lined boots, matches the fur stitched at the edges of her trendy, puffy, down jacket. She looks like someone who would want it to match. The dad scoops up his daughter before the dog reaches her, holding her safely against his pristine, dark green North Face jacket. The parents seem powerful, put together. I imagine lives that are easy, full of light. The daughter’s pink pom pom on her hat falls to the side as she peers over her dad’s shoulder, wriggling to try and reach the dog. When they open the door on their sleek Volvo station wagon, their daughter arches and struggles against the car seat her dad dutifully squeezes her into. The powerful Volvo seems to deflate in the toddler’s presence. Her parents too. They drive away, the headlights like beacons. Smaller red and yellow bumper lights blink as the Volvo turns left, out of view, disappearing into the coming darkness.
My reflection in the window stares back at me and I see a toddler, know what it is to arch my back against the darkness of the seasons of my life. I dream of big Volvo headlights driving me out of the darkness, away from what the darkness is trying to tell me. I’ve become adept at pushing away the darkness of dissatisfaction these past few years, and listening to the persistent, clanging refrain of hope that says if I keep moving, I won’t have to pay attention to the dissatisfaction. That’s what hope demands of us, doesn’t it? To keep our belief moving, always forward. But now the clanging refrain has morphed into a subtle murmur, I can barely hear it any longer. And suddenly the idea that I can outrun the darkness, like it’s a foot race to the light, seems a truth built on shifting sands. My swiftness of foot seems to be failing these days. I wonder if there’s anything wrong with lying down in the darkness, letting it run over me.
Even the golden retriever knows more about hope than I do. He still waits patiently by the bakery door, hopeful some treat will soon come his way. The jingle bell tied to the door handle rings out each time the door opens and someone new steps into the night. The dog tries to wedge his way inside the bakery, pressing against the pant legs of people leaving. Hope wriggles through his furry golden coat. When is the last time I felt like that? I heard somewhere recently that when we’ve lost the joy of our salvation it means we’ve forgotten how to praise God. Customers slide sideways around the dog, knees askew to block his entrance inside. Even when rebuffed, he keeps his hopeful posture; tongue hanging out, corners of his mouth pulled up as if smiling. His breath, visible in the air, encircles his fuzzy ears which lean forward, curious. His tail wiggles in the darkness, his hope focused on one thing: getting a treat. His owner appears from the bakery, finally, muffin in hand. The dog looks up at her, expectantly, sure some of the muffin will reach his lips. Maybe it does, but she unwinds his leash from the chair and they wander off, past the butcher shop, past the nail salon, lit only by the hanging string of lights, until they both disappear in the falling darkness.
I wonder, can I be as eternally hopeful as a golden retriever? I sit in the darkness wagging not a tail or a hope, and instead focus on some treat to distract me. Some hopeful thing beyond this darkness, this brooding sense of unfulfillment, the darkness of dissatisfaction. Is there some treat I believe will come to me if I hold out for hope long enough? I sit with this question on the hard, wooden, built-in bench (why no cushions, I wonder?) sipping my now-cold cup of tea, munching on a fresh-baked pretzel with chunks of salt that sting my lips. Can determined hope dispel the darkness? Or can the darkness teach me something about hope?
Could darkness be good, I wondered? Could it come from God’s hand, and be part of what I need in my life? To find an answer to this question, I know no other place to begin than at the beginning—Genesis. My bible, pages rife with colored post-it notes hanging from their edges, reminds me of sermons I’ve labored over and preached, and suddenly that skill feels like a long lost art in my life. Swallowed up in darkness somehow.
So I read.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters….And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1: 1-2, 31)
God created the darkness, and when God created light, God still did not remove the darkness. Night descends on day and day ascends on night and one fits alongside the other, does not overpower the other. Perhaps the darkness is meant to exist, even in me.
Instinctively, I understand the void, that sense of emptiness which begets dissatisfaction. In the beginning, darkness swirled with emptiness, and yet in that darkness, that very darkness that God created in the beginning, in that very darkness that God calls very good, there, God’s Spirit hovered.
God’s Spirit hovered and it brooded, like a duck hatching her eggs. And I try to imagine God brooding over my darkness, watching over it like a mother duck. God immovable over the birth of my darkness until it is formed perfectly and completely and born into a new life.
No matter the weather, I often walk the shore of Lake Washington, a mere mile from my home. Sometimes I run into my same neighbor Catherine with her dog. We pass each other walking around Seward Park, a peninsula of old growth forest known as much for its towering, ancient trees as for the two-and-a-half-mile paved path that rings its edges.
On these particularly dark mornings, I start my walk at the south shore of the peninsula in hopes of sneaking a glimpse at majestic Mount Rainier towering in the shadowy distance. At the water’s edge, I am met by a flock of small, black ducks hovered together on the dark, brooding water. I don’t remember seeing them in past seasons – but maybe I wasn’t paying attention.
I stop myself intentionally to watch them. I stop intentionally a lot these days, and not just on the shore. I’m trying to pay attention, get closer to the truth of things, see what I have not been seeing—in myself, in my husband, in my children, in how I show up in the world, in how the world shows up in me. I often wish I were a duck, living some carefree life on this lake of mine.
So I watch the ducks. Every morning, 7:00 am, they congregate just off the south shore. Black like the dark of December, they float like midnight on the lake in the morning hours, covering the distance of a football field effortlessly. Scattered in a thin line across the lake, now they gather into one large mass, moving together without strain or stress. A loose V-formation assembles and what I imagine to be the duck leader of the day runs point, and what I imagine to be a few stray teenagers fall out of formation.
Floating and flitting, they duck and dive, push their black, bobbing bodies together tightly. Their wings shimmer, restless against the glassy, grey lake. The sound of slap, flap, happy wings beat against my ears. They are the only sound of the morning, a premature drum beat to an orchestra not yet set. I look up from my clouded mind. Here, in this moment, a hundred ducks, probably more, have arrived with expectation, more expectation than I have, that their needs will be met in the normal course of their lives. No striving, only the most natural hunger being met in the most natural way.
Some, just up from a quick dive, shake their wet heads, water splashing the air, the lake. Others dive now, filling their bills with insects and algae, filtering until they get what they want. Their feeding hour has arrived, stands at attention for them, delivers what they need. The lake does its natural part, patiently, perfectly growing what is needed for their built-in, begging needs. Perhaps the darkness does the same for me. The natural rhythm of living in the darkness, embracing the darkness, could be the course of God’s divine hand meeting my begging needs. The ducks dive, their white tails upside down, at attention, if only momentarily, before their heads pop up. They shake the water free. Feathers flutter, water whisks away and they float further up the lake, a jubilant march, the cadence of joy.
And I feel their joy brooding over me. Hope skims across the surface of the dark waters to me.
As part of my Advent, I’ve taken to reading a chapter a day from the book of Luke. And no matter the darkness I sit in, in patient wait for the light of the world to come to me, the scripture does its natural work without fail, filling my bill with food, filtering until I get what I need. I look inside the scriptures and find that the Virgin Mary herself was overshadowed by the Most High, who cast a shadow of darkness over her in order to birth a savior. Darkness part of the goodness. Darkness part of the hope.
In the moment when the dawn yawns and stretches her arms and wakes the lake, the ducks follow me around the peninsula, their jet black bodies in pursuit of the morning. The sun spills over the lake and the water changes color from deep midnight to translucent navy, the kind of luminous color that you want to reach all the way through, feel its silk against the bellies of your arms, sink down into its hues. Reaching the west side of the peninsula, I watch the ducks slide towards the swimming area. A lone wooden platform hangs in the water, out from shore. Lonely and forgotten, bereft without the swimmers who lazily lie about its frame in the summer, it waits patiently for this season to end. No amount of sun in November can change this season or hurry the next.
The morning light has shifted, and I notice something new about the ducks. They aren’t black. I squint, and squint again, feel the cold skin crinkle at the edge of my eyes. I walk to the very edge of the path, then past it, stand on the muddy soil, small pebbles crunching underneath my feet as I peer over the evergreen bushes and past the beautiful, bare Alder tree branches. Focused, I steady my gaze, tilting my head to see clearly through my glasses. The ducks are grey. Definitely grey. And wait a minute—a speck of white gleams off the bill of each duck. “Are these the same ducks?” I say to myself. I know they are. But now, for the first time, I see them as they are: Grey bodied! Streaks of white on their bills! It seems they changed as they wound their way through the darkness. But that’s not true. And I stand, staring, at what looks like transformation before my eyes.