Searching For Light in the Dark

Sometimes it's hard to find

Photo by Paul Torres on Unsplash

“There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness.”

That quote from Maria Popova, who writes The Marginalian, one of the best newsletters I’ve ever read, sums up my experience today.

Some days things seem to be getting better, and I feel hopeful about the future. I can even see the good aspects of my current situation. Today is not one of those days.

My husband, cat, and I are still living in a hotel room. The friend we were supposed to stay with learned today that her health issues are more serious than she thought. We will have to find other housing for at least six months.

That news shocked and scared all of us. Yet again, our lives are changing in ways we didn’t anticipate or desire.

I suspect you know what that’s like. Even if your life is pretty good these days, chances are you’ve been through dark periods before.

I certainly have, which is how I know that somehow, some way, we will emerge from this dark time. We will find light in the midst of it, too.

As Popova writes immediately after the words quoted earlier,

It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light.

So today I’m listening and waiting for what I hear to become new light.

How about you? Are you in the midst of a primordial darkness in which a new self is being born? If so, I hope Popova’s words remind you to listen and trust that there will be light.

Her newsletter also included a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke. Here are the lines that spoke to me today:

Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.

May we all find ways to move back and forth into the changes we experience and become stronger as we do.