dark

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

~ T.S. Eliot ~

In the Before, I had no problem with "dark." In fact, when I was seeing clients, or writing for various papers, I often talked about fear of the dark, fear of darkness, the endless pitting of darkness versus light, how silly it all was. Darkness is nothing to fear; darkness is just an inner turn, a waiting. Most things start in darkness. All germination begins in dark (well, okay, except for a few flower seeds that need light to germinate...). Anyway. Darkness is not now, and never has been, a metaphor for lostness or evil or anything negative at all, for me. Why do I say this? Well, because I like this Eliot poem very much. And because all my metaphors and analogies of life in the Before instantly became useless emptiness the moment the lead warden stepped out of the woods and said, "I'm sorry, but he's passed."

The darkness is the light, and the stillness is dancing.


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