Beautiful Darkness
It’s holding us all
How’s your heart?
This has been a mind-bending, heart-shifting, and, I admit, a really bad not very good year for my heart.
Something has been put in motion that will not end this December or January, or in 2022, or in 2032.
Some of that something will turn out to be beautiful.
Even now, when so much is breaking or giving in, there is something that does not care about how we feel at the moment: beauty. Beauty is agenda-free, above every zero-sum game, and below every bottom line. Always available to our imagination.
I want to take a break for some time from talking about what I do. At the beginning of this Winter (Northern Hemisphere), I want to share with you a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that saved my life before, inviting us to consider the possibility of being held by the darkness. See if it can help you find beauty as nights get longer.
YOU DARKNESS
You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight -
and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.
… by Rainer Maria Rilke
And for the days when you feel like going for an evening walk…
SWEET DARKNESS
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
… by David Whyte (New and Selected Poems, Revised Edition)
May you find your way through this winter and emerge on the other side stronger for having imagined.
👉🏼 To learn more about how you can benefit from my work, go to: www.samirselmanovic.com and www.turncommunity.com
