The Teachings of Stavros

Dark Night of the Soul

A story within a story and a poem

Dreamtime

I am driving towards the highway heading home. There is a field off to the left. I see a hawk flying overhead going in a circle and then it dives. Suddenly I am the hawk. I feel the air rush through my wings, I feel a sense of anticipation as my eyes close in on my prey. I feel exhilaration as my claws grab the snake. Suddenly I am the snake. I feel the pierce of the claws in my flesh and my body curls into a circle as my body loses purchase with the ground. I snap and bite my own tail. Then surrender.

I’m on the highway now, heading home.

Natural World

There was nothing to do but surrender.

The etymology of surrender is to merge with that which is greater than yourself. God, Creation, The Great Mystery, your higher self, or however you want to say it that works for you. There is a different word for water in every language, but they all still refer to the same thing.

A conversation I had with Stavros one summer evening entered my mind like a candlelight in the darkness. Stavros was attracted to stories the way Raven was drawn to shiny objects. Finding a good story was just as important to him in his ports of call as finding a good woman for the night. He collected them, he re-invented them, and he shared them. He was telling me about his favorite Sufi stories collected in his travels through Turkey, Persia, and parts of the Near East. He loved the stories of Mullah Nasreddin, the trickster and holy fool, that shows up in thousands of Sufi stories to open the minds of the followers of that path. This is the story of the lost key. I think he took some creative liberties with it.

One night, Mullah Nasreddin was under the bright lamp post outside his house on his hands and knees searching for something. His neighbour sees this and comes out to ask if everything is okay. Nasreddin replies that he is fine but that he dropped his house key so he is looking for it because he cannot get inside his home. The neighbour, being a kindly man, offers to help and promptly gets down on his hands and knees searching with Nasreddin. After some time has passed by, he looks up at Nasreddin and asks, “Are you sure you dropped it here? We have looked everywhere, and it is nowhere to be found.” Nasreddin looks back up at his neighbour and says, “No, I lost it over there. Under the dark bushes but the light is better here for searching.”

Stavros is laughing at the story he just shared and concludes, “Do you see Palikari? Sometimes you need to go into the dark to find the key. Embrace the darkness. It is also a womb.”

Yes, into the dark. But this wasn’t any ordinary dark. This was the proverbial dark night of the soul. A biblical night, a Dreamtime night where time melts like a Dali painting making it uncertain when it will end. It brings life out of focus; you lose a sense of meaning and connection to life.

But the dark night is also a womb and a birth canal.

It turns out that sometimes a small rebirth is insufficient for life. Sometimes the space of your life becomes too small, like the womb you have outgrown. Maybe because you have grown too large for the life space you are in or perhaps, like in my case, you shrunk your world out of pain and despair. In either case, you then must take the paradoxical journey through the dark and narrow confines of the birth canal towards mystery, vulnerability, and the possibility of freedom. This is the meaning of a quest as well. A journey through the unknown towards healing, discovery, and renewal. This type of rebirth has a sense of urgency about it because avoidance has dire circumstances associated with it. You die a little each day and take part of the world with you.

Soul’s Dark Night

Anyone who has lived a half-life of barely spoken desires needs a dark night of the soul to push them out the door and onto a holy quest and into the darkness and there to find on hands and knees a key and a door into a new and fuller life

In that dark seemingly endless night I have walked with death and despair and met Poseidon in the churning sea with my guts wrenching and his trident shattering my breastbone revealing a deeper truth in me

This is another fragment of the story unfolding out of me. A quest to discover a lost promise. This wasn’t just any promise but the kind that we make deep in our bodies and in the quiet depths of our souls. It is the kind of promise that it would kill us to break.

I am sharing the fragments of the story as they come to me. This story then is a mended bowl with its scars visible and I hope beautiful in its own way. I will allow the fractures to be mended through the resonant echoes in your heart and mind. The story needs you too. If this story has any value, it is because you will also fill it with yourself.

Thank you for reading. Fragments can be found in my travelogue series as well as in various poems I have published.