A Voyage Into and Out of Darkness

Through Story and Poetry

A seed is the promise of life. A seed without a promise withers. How could we know that promises can get lost?

Dreamtime

A promise is born. He is a pappus taking flight. A wild seed windswept in joy. He was born in dreams that soared. Both old and new at the same time. He glides in the infinite mindscape of Dreamtime, crossing boundaries of time and space. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to do. It was only after some time he realized that he needed the ground to make sense of the air. He understood now that he must fall before soaring high once more. That was the promise he held. It was the promise he offered. He longed to find his place, his promise to receive, but he was lost.

Natural World

The pain was palpable, the darkness intense. This cut deeper than I could put into words. There was no object to the loss; it was all essence. It was the kind of loss that could kill you. It was the loss of a true promise.

The void filled everything for a time. The darkness grew with a new illness and then, one year later, the passing of Max. He kissed me one more time on the nose before he left. The wheel turned for him and he had another voyage to take. My “familiar” was gone.

The light became my enemy. I hated the morning, for it brought in the harshness of my reality. Memory became a time-hollowed husk, all ghosts, and no substance. The fractures of my life came into sharp relief in the light. They were too raw, too cutting. The darkness brought both pain and escape. I hid there for some time. It felt like it swallowed me.

Dreamtime

Never was

Because we did not touch even from the inside I did not fathom that in the silent depths of me promises had formed. And when that part of me that never was was shorn away my anguish was a tundra of frozen tears as if I looked back (and you would too if your world was lost) and all that was left was a pillar of salt.

Natural World

My skin still walked the world, though as if everything was ordinary. Well-meaning voices spoke to it of my gifts and the beauty I offered the world regardless of my losses. I, too, sculpted words into images of resiliency and strength. Yet, truth be told, these were flimsy, like childhood fabrications of paper mâché. Lacking substance, they easily shattered, for I felt hollow and empty. The only beauty I felt was akin to that found in carved ivory, the kind that has been ripped away from its promise keeper. The polished surface trying to hide the story of the stolen life left decaying.

Dreamtime

I am in a store looking at fine art sculptures. I am looking for beauty, for inspiration, for hope. I see this ivory carving of an elephant trumpeting its joy to the world. What irony, I think, an elephant tusk carved into an image of an elephant. Did the artist think themselves witty, I wonder?

I reach out to feel if there is joy in its touch. Ouch! A spark ignites as my skin is sliced while tracing the edge of the carving.

As I watch my accidental blood offering stain the polished white sculpture, I am suddenly transported into a grassy plain where elephants are roaming exuberantly free, only to have the scene explode into a madness of gunfire and death.

Images of knives and blood fill my vision above the shrieks of ravens circling the scene. Vultures bow their heads on tree branches as they wait. An unkindness and a death. I open my eyes and look at the carving and promptly throw up.

Not all art is beautiful. Art through massacre and stolen promises is black magic. It casts shade upon the world and darkens the path to nobility and beauty. The words in my notebook are smeared, running wet with tears and spittle.

Natural World

You may wonder, if in the depth of my darkness, I contemplated the ultimate escape. I did. Not in any active way, at least not at first. Early on there was a mere disregard for life, a negligence, if you will, of the simple everyday care one takes. It would show up in how I would eat and drink or the way I would walk without consideration of my surroundings. If I happened to get struck dead, then so be it. But there were also conscious contemplations, wonderings on bridges and by trains, musing of gunfire or medicines. It was all conceptual, I would tell myself.

One late evening the line between the conceptual and the experiential faded the way reverie vanishes when you stumble against the hard surfaces of life. I traveled by train to the airport to catch a red-eye flight to Montreal. I descended to the station platform. Like most city trains stations this one resides in the bowels of the city, two maybe three stories down. This late at night, it was deserted save for two large, hooded men.

Dreamtime

I have no fear. When they see me, they look quickly away as if they have seen a phantom. I am amused to see them retreat further down the station. For a moment I consider messing with them but instead I glance up at the electronic sign showing train names and arrival times. I see that mine will be the second train coming through the platform. As I hear the first train approaching, I stand at the edge of the platform beyond the safety of the yellow line. I just want to sense the power of the coming force. A moment later it blows through. The wind energy it brings is inviting. I feel its power. I could easily be windswept on such a force. I imagine being carried to a place without care, without thought, and without responsibility. A few minutes later, I hear my train arriving.

Yet I am held and by the very same force that brought me to the edge. And so I decline the wind’s invitation and enter the train’s belly along with the two hooded men. The ride dispels the tension. As I ascend, I take out my notebook. The moment compels words that require binding. The way down and the way up need mapping. (See Grief’s Paradox)

Natural World

I won’t delve into many more details of the pain and darkness that enclosed me. I know that you have experienced your own. You understand this. I want you to know that you are not alone.

I want you to know that there is a way outside of that sealed room. There is suffering, and there is a path out of suffering. Grief, when met well, becomes the egress lighting illuminating the way out. Do not hold your pain in silence and secrecy. Pain and suffering kept in secret birth shame and shame can devour your soul the way cancer can devour the body.

In the end, shadow always gives way to the light we shine upon it. Reach out to your tribe, to your elders, and to the wisdom holders in your community, they are also the light.

Do not, however, expect the path to be straight or easy. It is nevertheless absolutely necessary. You deserve the light, and the world needs your light to return. A promise is waiting to be found or born in you and through you.

Dreamtime

Voice

Step into the silence and say something true for words are seeds carried in prayers and spells waiting for your voice to scatter them onto fertile souls

The loss led to a quest to find the lost promise. The quest was real and crossed borders of time, geography, and expectation. In the stories I share and the forthcoming book that will mend the stories, the quest is transmuted metaphorically into a form of autobiographical allegorical fiction that dips a toe or two into urban fantasy and cross-cultural mythology.

There are real events/experiences and events/experiences that are true in essence if not in literal fact. As noted previously, I also weave a tapestry of the mind using threads of standard and nonstandard states of consciousness.

References from previous publications:

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