When the darkness wants my attention, they make them self known through the patterns I once moved through mindlessly. They come to me in the frantic reaching for another handful of chips, despite not having chewed the first one, a threatening knot in my throat that can be yanked from either end by any minor inconvenience, the act of furiously flailing through motion that refuses to settle, and its opposite, a collapse in cognition and cemented body that render me utterly incapable of doing a single thing.
Upon hearing the knock at my door, the past me would have turned up the music and pulled the blinds shut. Or maybe she wouldn’t have heard it at all. But experience has shown me that should I not grant entry to my dark guest, they will take increasingly dramatic measures to break in. Their howls haunt the hallways and quash any hopes of sleep. They shroud my windows in shadow and rattle the walls. And if that doesn’t work, they may burn the whole place down. So now I listen for them, and when they come, I know I have no choice but to set down my to do list and open my door to that which awaits me.
Horn Player, Zdzisław Beksiński
At first, the presence of this volatile visitor can feel like entirely too much. There is a reason many of us never grant them entry. And the longer we’ve kept them out in the cold, the greater the force of the storm that blows through once they’ve gotten in. Their repression turned expression often knocks me over and leaves me flattened against the cool tiles of the kitchen floor. But as time passes, their stirring slows alongside the rhythm of my surrender, and the holy heartache becomes a portal back to my centre. It is here that I am softened by a certain calm that I had been unconsciously searching for everywhere else. When I look over to my companion, I no longer see a swarm of thrashing tendrils and inky obscurity, but a pair of trembling hands, a heaving rib cage and weary eyes, a reflection of my own.
“Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.”
-Izumi Shikibu
In times when I find myself spinning through my mind, seeking a practical solution for building anxiety and the sense that I may come undone at any moment, the only true remedy to suffering seems to live within the ritual of offering myself over to it. To open ourselves up to the hoarded hurting of our personal and collective stories is to honour all that is- the disappointment, hope, horror, gratitude, rage, love. It is through the sacred act of grief tending that we recover what has been banished to the boneyards of what feels most unbearable and incomprehensible. It is how we remember our personal power and the purpose that fuels it.
Just as Persephone returns to the underworld, we too must submerge ourselves in the murky waters of the unseen realm within ourselves. We must walk out into the night and lose ourselves in the reverie of the moon’s wisdom just as we lift our face to be warmed by the sun. We must open our door to the dark guest and invite them in for tea.
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