Celebrating Darkness and the Moon

blythes

Over in the tangible world, I am convening a gathering called a Moon Circle affiliated with the dark phase of the moon.  The phases of the moon remind us of the circular nature of time – birth, life, death, rebirth. The new moon crescent waxes to full, then wanes to a night of total darkness, then begins again. Living as we do in a linear world of work schedules, project timelines, and the expectation of never-ending growth and pursuit of perfection, we have in many ways lost the regenerative, soothing flow of a life lived in cycles.

Whether your view of the moon is mystical or scientific, there is wisdom and benefit to be gained by reorienting even a portion of our life to a lunar cycle.  While our society as a whole is overly fixated on the bright and shiny (the sun) versus the more soothing, silvery light of the moon – if there’s any phase of the moon we tend to tune into, it’s the phase of “fulfillment” – the full moon.

There is value in making space to acknowledge the dark phase of the moon. It can bring us back into alignment with a practice of rest because that is the phase of life in which we generate, rejuvenate, and incubate not only our inner strength but all that which we hope to share with others. It’s also often the space where we can process challenging and emotionally complex experiences like grief and transformation.  

The focus of our first dark/new moon gathering is therefore a celebrating of darkness. To celebrate the dark, to draw inspiration and nourishment from the dark, it’s helpful to notice the many ways it has been devalued, oppressed, or given a negative association in dominate Western culture. It’s interesting to note that darkness is usually defined as being a lack of light, rather than light being defined as a lack of darkness. This isn’t to say there aren’t rich, important and necessary associations of the dark with things we consider negative or challenging—but it’s far from the whole story. 

There are a myriad of reasons why light is revered in our culture both in practical and 

mythological ways. Much of our contemporary storytelling is steeped in the concept of good versus evil from books to movies to gaming. For fans of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars – both are centered on an ongoing battle between good and bad which is directly acquainted to light vs dark. Even comedy if it is grim, macabre, or depressing is referred to as black comedy. And it’s true that darkness can be scary – most people whether sighted or blind have light sensing ability, and when we lose the effectiveness of that sense it can be disorienting and anxiety-ridden.   

But I would argue that a lot of our relationship with the dark – especially the metaphor of darkness as evil, negative, or undesirable has been perpetuated as a way to serve different power structures for a very long time in Western traditions—especially religious and economic powers. One could write a whole book on the subject but I will summarize at a high level.

Religion – Christianity, the dominate religion in Western culture, worships a sky god. Ascension, afterlife/heaven in the sky, winged angels, and immaculate conception all looks upward. Even physical death—the final embodied darkness—has been deemphasized with the separation of the soul from the body and its elevation to a higher realm. Most of the imagery literally lifts the attention away from the earth and all that entails: soil/land, women/wombs, conception, embodied or physical decay and rebirth, veneration of vegetal and animal life. To suppress the many earth-based beliefs and practices across Europe, men in the early Christian church prioritized the concept of human dominance over the earth and male dominance over women, painted a view of women’s bodies as corrupt and corrupting, and perpetuated misogyny and propaganda against land-based veneration, practices, and spirits often associated with earthy and underworld places. Hell, the underworld, became a place of evil where before it was the home of the dead.

Economics – Contemporary capitalism, and its roots in the European economics of past centuries, have required access to cheap resources that in turn generate huge amounts of money. Most things on the planet are not “cheap” so they must be cheapened or devalued in order to make greater profit.  Not all that has been devalued has association with darkness but a few notable ones come to mind:  dark-skinned bodies and land/soil/oil. It was to the advantage to those with economic power to extend this metaphor of darkness as bad—if something is seen negatively, it is easier to treat it as a cheap resource. It even becomes a moral imperative to do so. One might also argue that while women have been seen useful in baring children to supply the workforce, their reproductive ability—the dark space of the womb once given divine status—has been devalued and controlled, and the power of those with a uterus diminished. 

I’m sure some would posit that ancient humans would have naturally feared the dark because they would have been in greater danger at night and therefore it’s inherently human to have negative associations with the dark. This is likely true to a degree, however, very little in what we know about ancient cultures suggests that early man was incapable of a having a complex relationship with the dark that would have included a range of responses from fear, to caution, to practical appreciation, to veneration.

What is clear is that humans are highly influenced by story and will extend the metaphors of culturally important stories to the actions of their life.  Similarly, people understand the power of story and will use it to bring others around to their way of thinking. Was this association of the dark with negativity therefore intentionally cultivated or a byproduct of shifting ideologies? Undoubtedly both. 

At the root of these negative associations with darkness is the temptation of binary thinking—that things must be one thing or another. Binaries are powerful and can be quite appealing. They eliminate messy in-between states that are neither quite one thing or another. Binary code is running our computerized technology. There’s elegance in a binary. Think of the striking appeal of a black and white gown or checkerboard floor. They aren’t inherently bad or good, but they are limited and limiting. Binary thinking is often used by those in power. By creating an “us vs them” approach you can win people to your side and undermine coalitions that might naturally form amongst people with shared needs despite very different ways of life. 

I would argue that Western culture’s long devaluing of the trickster figure—a subversive figure neither all bad nor all good—goes hand in hand with the culture’s lowered ability to navigate the murky, the messy, the in-between, the grey area. (In many ways the Trickster was subsumed by Satan). It helps to have models, figures, stories that give us context – to remind us that life can’t be reduced entirely to opposites all of the time.  In fact, employing a binary to intentionally manipulate or undermine the opposition is a very Trickster sort of thing to do. Having culturally relevant Trickster stories help walk us back to the bigger picture—to see the strategy for what it is, to recognize the false allure of the seemingly simple solution.  

Binary thinking applied to Light and Dark has come to have a strong association with Good and Bad. Light by definition is bright and often white and this has also come to mean divine, good, life-giving, pure, healthy, safe, etc. And if light is all of those things, then in binary thinking darkness must be the opposite: evil, death-bringing, bad, unhealthy, unsafe. Look at the word “enlightened” to mean knowledgeable and aware – suggesting that it is light that brings wisdom, epiphany, facts, and what we believe to be true.  The reality is that both light and dark can be any or all of those things depending on context.  The dark is life giving (think of the womb, the egg, the nest, the den) but it is life giving in a way totally unique from the light. 

So what does this mean for us to today—for those of us who have been raised in this context and may have internalized these concepts without ever thinking about them? I think by acknowledging the binary and beginning to challenge it in our own minds, we will open the door for balance within our own lives which in turn creates the shift for society. 

If we start to list “dark things” we quickly see the beauty, the nourishing, the safety, the rebirth that can come from dark places and dark beings: healthy black soil, the hollow log, the cozy space beneath a blanket, the beetle eating the dead, wombs, the night sky. In many ways the dark cultivates and sustains life alongside the light. 

A deeply imbedded bias toward the light does not serve us – it prevents us from prioritizing the activities that require the dark. We have evolved to live half of our time (on average throughout the whole year) away from the sun’s light. When we acknowledge the importance and power of darkness in our own lives, we can cultivate a society where we rest as much as we work, and rejuvenate not only ourselves, but other life on this planet.

If you feel inspired to reorient your relationship to the dark, I would encourage you also to leave behind the idea of the continuum.  I remember when I first encountered the idea of a continuum it felt very freeing. Instead of just stark opposites, suddenly I could describe the wonderful range of grey between the black and white.  We could put Light and Dark on a continuum and leave them there – as the sun sets the light diminishes as it gradually becomes darker—this continuum is a real phenomenon. I invite you, however, to step beyond even the continuum – beyond the concept that to relish the dark you somehow have to diminish the light, or vice versa.  We have dark shadows at high noon, we can dance around a fire at midnight.  Winter is the darkest time of year where I live, but it also can bring the bright white of snow. If we can truly value darkness for its own gifts, then we can also cultivate stillness/holding/rooting amidst energy/expansion/growth. We can live a life of slipping effortlessly between the velvet cool of a shadow and the warm shining sun. I wish for us all to find the divinity of the dark and all it helps us cultivate. What could it mean for us to have a definition of the dark that goes beyond it being a lack of light?  

The moon is always moving in phases and those cycles can help remind us to reorient to a cyclical way of being. I am not suggesting that it is reasonable or even desirable that we try to orient all aspects of our lives to fully coincide with the daily phase of the moon. Contemporary life makes this challenging, and we also live in overlapping cycles that may be in different phases – the recurring dark of every night, the dark of the moon, the dark of the winter as you move toward either pole of the earth. So I’m not suggesting we reorganize our life to another rigid way of being. However, it helps you to reinstate this balance in your life (and if you love the moon as I do) you might consider reserving some time close to the darkest phase of the moon, marked as the new moon on calendars, to engage in these qualities of darkness. 

May we burrow, nourish, cultivate, and rest even as we shine. 

I touched on topics you may wish to explore in more depth: