There are so many lights in the dark

some hunches, utterances, verses, and glimmers after a walk up the lane

El Rio de Luz (The River of Light), 1877, Frederic Edwin Church

I only went out for a walk up the lane, but ended up watching a prayer. It took the form of a sunset — a big red ball sinking into the earth, or rather, a big red ball that I am spinning away from while it stays still. I’ve done this with God too, believing he’d sunk into the earth, gone, when the truth was he was still and burning and it was me spinning off into the dark.

Thankfully, the world keeps turning. Thankfully, the light comes again. That’s the prayer I watched; my soul and the sun meeting, each committing to keeping my eyes open to the light.

Anne Lamott said, “I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” Grace is something I absolutely do not understand yet absolutely do feel.

Tonight, the glow of existence is there even when the sun has gone down: golden honeysuckle that smells like a sweet poem, swallows catching the cooling breeze before sleep, a sky that glows peach with the memory of sun. We all carry the memory of light, I think — even when we’re bathed in shadow, even when all we’ve known is night. That memory calls us forward, calls us into ourselves — those selves that were born radiant as a supernova.

There is a kind of cave-dwelling moss called Schistostega, or goblin’s moss, or dragon’s gold. For most plants, caves are not a good habitat. There is not enough light for them to photosynthesise. But instead of trying to compete, Schistostega has learned to survive with very little light. It is poised ready to receive scraps of light, and when it does, that light is refracted and mixed with green light that isn’t absorbed by the moss’s chloroplasts (can you tell I have a BSc in biology from half a lifetime ago?). This bounces back into the environment and it glows. With its little lens-shaped cells, the moss focuses the dim light. I want to be like that moss.

Dragon’s gold, or, Schistostega, image from Guardian article here

The dark cave contains goblins and dragons, but also a green-gold that glows. We just need to go there, and look.

The dark places contain delusion, despair, but also a love that burns. We just need to go there, and look.

I am beginning to feel where there is, what that love is, and I feel increasingly able to utter it. Often, its name is God, and it is weird and vast and mostly outside of four walls. It struck me that God is like Aladdin’s genie with “phenomenal cosmic power” but often trapped in the “itty-bitty living space” that religion can allow. But, there’s something in what musician Nick Cave says too, that “religion is spirituality with rigour”. There is something in the groundedness, the community, the sacredness and song of some churches (not all churches) that helps me to approach mystery, and otherness, and grace. There is something else though in church that feels stagnant and inward looking and disconnected from the wildness of our souls, our universe. Jesus often retreated to the mountains, the water, the wilderness to meet God. I often think church needs to do the same.

Virginia Woolf, in To The Lighthouse, wrote, “A light here requires a shadow there.”

And the converse is also true: a shadow here requires a light there.

I think we’ve become good at seeing the shadows in our world, at being cynical and fearful, expecting dragons and darkness and doom. And we should be honest about the darkness, the unknowns ahead, the need for truth and justice and healing in so many lives and places right now. But I think we’re forgetting how to focus the light, and why it matters that we do so. I think there are lots of people who feel spiritually, politically, culturally, economically, collectively homeless just now. Dis-located by pessimism and pressure and fragmentation and grief. There are lights in dark places though, and if we can see them, I have a hunch they might ignite us, guide us back to belonging, like long ago when we cohered as atoms in stars and together, we shone.

I’ve seen a few other lights in the dark recently:

• The Aurora Borealis. The sun dancing with the night to make waves of pink, red, green. I’ve wanted to see this light always; always thought I would have to travel to see it. We saw it from our garden. We did not have to travel to find the light. It is here.

• The Milky Way galaxy. A streak of stars spilt across the dark night. How strange, to think of a spiralling 100,000-light-year-wide disc hurtling through the universe as our home.

• The Perseid Meteor Shower. Each year, we pass through debris left by the Swift–Tuttle comet, which orbits the sun every 133 years. A distant and headlong rock has left us yearly flashes of light. From disintegration, something beautiful and orienting.

• The Nebra Skydisc. A 3,500-year-old disc unearthed in the 90s that depicts the heavens. Time and earth has given its bronze a blue-green patina, its gold features — sun, moon, starts, boat — are gold still. The disc glowed with story as much as gold when I saw it in the dark of the British Museum.

• And here’s a post I wrote last year about Thomas Hardy’s poem The Darkling Thrush, and its singing, and its hope — another kind of light.

The sun has set, the dark has come, it’s now almost midnight. My lamp glows, and a candle. I flicked the switch, I lit the wick, and this is something to remember too: that sometimes, we can invite the light ourselves.

Ok, sunsets and moss, auroras and candles. So what? I can feel a whisper, I can see a glow, and I’m trying to follow it. Here are my intentions. Nothing very different, just an extra layer round here. I’d love you to stick around for the journey, though I understand if it’s not what you came here for (isn’t it weird, the kind of trigger warnings we sometimes put around anything numinous, spiritual, unseen? As if facing away from the purely rational needs justifying. As if letting ourselves surrender to mystery and to deep hunches feels like something we need to shamefully admit to. Or maybe that’s just me, so conditioned to monitor, to please, to not let people feel uncomfortable).

• I’ll still write pieces for my series on ‘The Village’, exploring what community / home / neighbourhood / place / care / love means, especially in light of having become a mother. And sometimes too in the light of spiritual dis-location.

• I’ll still write pieces about writing and books, and my own book I’m working on.

• Having “dropped the G-bomb” as Elizabeth Oldfield put it, I’ll draw on aspects of God, and ancient words, and female mystics like Julian of Norwich, seeking light here and in other places: nature, people, poems. In many ways, it’s hard to talk about light in one place without seeing how it touches everything anyway. I want to share things I’ve found in the cave — both dragons and gold. There are lines in Nick Cave’s new album Wild God that feel messily true and like a place I want to write towards:

And the people on the ground cried when does it start? And the wild god says it starts with the heart, with the heart, with the heart…

And, elsewhere on the album, and more explicitly:

She sits at the window
Her hands folded on her sleeping lap
As He steps from the tomb
In his rags and his wounds
Into the yellow light that streams
Through the window, He brings
Peace and good tidings to the land…
…He will bring
Good tidings to all things

(I am not a big fan of Nick Cave’s back catalogue. This album though is evocative, soul-stirring, complex. It weaves joy and despair in the wake of the death of two of his sons, and a mystery and unexpected light that Cave seems to have found in a Christian God).

This was going to be a very short post. It grew. Thanks for getting this far. I’d love to hear your reflections, your feelings, your own lights in the dark? For now, this:

Drifting, by Mary Oliver

I was enjoying everything: the rain, the path
wherever it was taking me, the earth roots
beginning to stir.
I didn’t intend to start thinking about God,
it just happened.
How God, or the gods, are invisible,
quite understandable
But holiness is visible, entirely.
It’s wonderful to walk along like that,
thought not the usual intention to reach an
answer
but merely drifting.
Like clouds that only seem weightless.
but of course are not.
Are really important.
I mean, terribly important.
Not decoration by any means.
By next week the violets will be blooming.

Anyway, this was my delicious walk in the rain.
What was it actually about?

Think about what it is that music is trying to say.
It was something like that.

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