Today is the Winter Solstice. Below, is (roughly) what I said to my students in our classes this week. Today, we come to practice at a time of year when darkness is most present. Our nights are long, almost as long as they can possibly be. But in just a few short days, the darkness will have come as far as it can go. The tide will turn and each day, a tiny bit more light will come into our experience.
Yoga teaches us that balance is essential. Through our yoga practice, we learn to value both the light and the dark, equally. We understand that balance is not the absence of darkness; we will not find peace, health or happiness if we only experience light. Darkness is essential. If you have ever planted a seed in the ground or grown a human being in your belly; if you have ever sought the shade on a scorching hot day or dove down deep into the cool darkness beneath the surface of a lake in August, then you have tasted the sweet, life-giving beauty, the comfort that darkness provides. Each of us, when we lie down at night and turn out the lights and close our eyes, with any luck, this darkness offers us peaceful slumber, a chance for our bodies and minds to rest and restore.
Of course, there are also many ways in which darkness is not comforting. Darkness also brings hardship, pain, loss. But, I would suggest that this kind of Darkness also presents opportunities to experience Light in ways we never otherwise could. Darkness gives us access to doorways we would not otherwise encounter. And if we are able to find our courage, our compassion, our way through these doors, then we experience the most extraordinary of Lights.
I had occasion recently to visit with a firefighter friend. He has lived for many years in a home on a lake in East Orland that used to be a camp owned by my grandmother. When I was a little girl, there was a time when we didn’t have any place to live. My grandmother went to Florida and we stayed in that camp with no running water and practically no heat. That winter, my mother climbed down to the frozen lake each day, hacked through the surface with a pickaxe, and filled a 5-gallon bucket with water, which she then carried back up to the house to use for cooking and sponge baths and flushing the toilet.
My childhood was so hard that I once had a therapist stop our first session, take off her glasses, put her head down on her desk, and cry. “It’s just so SAD!” she said. And that was after only a 15-minute matter-of-fact accounting of some basic details. As far as I was concerned, we hadn’t even gotten to the sad stuff.
This reaction—or perhaps some more modulated version of it—is typical. If I tell someone about my childhood, they almost always feel pity, worry, confusion, sorrow, anger, or blame. It’s uncomfortable for me. It makes it hard to tell the truth, even to myself.
It has been difficult to make peace with my own past—and therefore difficult to rise up as a whole-hearted human being--because I couldn’t find a peaceful truth, a state of balance, a way to come to terms with and integrate healthfully both the darkness and the light of my early life experiences. My sense, I now realize, was that darkness is inherently bad. I reasoned that if I lived through darkness, then that time must be bad; and I must also be bad. I have slowly, over the years, been chipping away with my own metaphysical pick-axe at this frozen inner lake of self-loathing and confusion, trying to come to terms with it all. Looking for an answer, a way to integrate all of it, the good
and the bad.
I hadn’t been back to that place on the lake since I was about nine years old. And despite the presence of suffering during my time there, I was delighted, excited, and moved to be invited back to visit. Along with the hardship, I also experienced some of my most powerful and magical childhood memories living by that lake.
After having committed the highly unlikely acts of returning to live in Maine, then joining a fire department at the age of 40, these two—miraculous--choices brought me to meet the wonderful, down-to-earth, clever, rugged, kind-hearted man who had bought this camp, built it up into a beautiful, warm and rustic home where he and his wife could raise their on own girls. Those choices brought me to the moment, this autumn, when I found myself transported through time, standing three decades later on the same deck, next to the same tree, looking out at the same body of water, with this kind firefighter friend. We looked out over the lake and I reminisced about all the good times, all the special things about this particular place. He and his beloved wife raised two girls in this home (which is now warm and toasty and boasts plenty of indoor plumbing) and, although we grew up decades apart, his girls and I shared many of the same fun experiences, special places and unique aspects of that magical location. I showed him and his daughter my pictures from that time.
I was glowing as I told him about all the good stuff…but, I also felt it wouldn’t be right to act as though it had only been good. It was also incredibly, brutally, terribly hard. So I smiled, feeling sort of ashamed, expecting that reaction of pity or horror from my listener and I said, self-consciously, as a sort of confession, I suppose, “There was also hardship...”
He stood there, his back to the water, his hands in the pockets of his well-worn jeans, and he nodded his pony-tailed head. He smiled a little, nodded, and said in his warm, kind voice, “Hardship is okay.”
Hardship is okay, my friends! Hardship is okay.
I felt a warm wave of relief wash over me as this truth touched my very core.
Hardship is okay. Today, as we come to practice in the darkness, I offer you this truth: hardship is okay. This is not to deny that it is, in fact, hard. Hardship is by definition
hard.
But there was so much respect, so much knowing, so much Truth in this remark, when my firefighter friend said it to me. He has experienced hardship, my friends, deep, heart-breaking hardship. But, he knows…hardship is okay. Hardship is part of life. Hardship is not inherently bad. Any expectation that life should be free of hardship is just wrong. Hardship—darkness—they are okay. They are alright. They are part of the balance, part of what makes us whole. They bring us to doorways we would never reach otherwise, and on the other side of those doorways are the most beautiful things life has to offer.
As we practice tonight, my friends, as you close your eyes and rest and breathe in the darkness; as your mind gets busy, and perhaps as your mind revisits open wounds or new worries, I invite you to offer yourself this same truth: that Darkness is essential. That sometimes it comforts; it makes life possible. And even when it brings hardship…it is okay.
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| With a Jack-in-the-pulpit I found near this camp when we were living there. |
