In an unfortunate crypsis, often what is most meaningful is most disguised. Pricking the edges of those deranging crevices right under our noses yet never given proper attention lest we sneeze all over it. I have found that wisdom can only be found in relationship yet is it all the more true that most of dusted accounts of philosophy, psychology, and religion to be in abuse to any duality? That the relationships we have been most separated from are the relationships we feel most connected to—strung on this threadbare connective web? This web where we contemplate if it is self, lover or trap. We have turned into turnips, so rooted in the darkness of separation that only uprooted in our remembering can we turn not fiercely up but down.
Could it be said that in our hiding from ourselves, in these hallowed grounds of a hide-and-seek, that the taproots of truth were only to be tapped into by a resting into what is hidden? Could the very foolproofness of our scientific methods, geographical surveys, and categoricity fool our proofs of nature by paving and concretizing what is sacred? Perhaps all that we seek, all that we and the world is so nourished by is subscending deep and those places of darkness—those places our cultures are so allergic to and call poison—to be exactly the remedy to our illness. Perhaps the illness that we so rush to medicate creates the pain. And with this disconnect from our own wound, we hide from meeting pain. Yet, exactly in this ignore-ance the sore grows thick. As when become that caboose of suffering (literally wanting to be the end our suffering) that follows the pathology of pain, we fail to tend to our wounds. As we become so reluctant to even touching its edges: those places of throbbing pain that we need to touch in order to heal.
For cabooses always follow a train at its end. The caboose of reluctance, hesitation, and curiosity can so speak to how our gifts have so crippled us. So reluctant to share our pain and to open vulnerably to others because of how unaccommodating and unreciprocal life has become that we can only so in the integrity and fidelity to therapists. Which is not to express therapy is unfulfilling but to observe how families are torn a part in this dual silence even when a therapist and counselor can be present.
Despite the natural resistance of a caboose, being at the tail end and being in direct view of what we have left. Often times the caboose is distorted to be something we need to leave, as we forget the caboose is connected to ourselves. Like the way we want to rewrite our own histories, as we fall into this engine of could, would, and should that express this blaming, shaming, and remorse. As cabooses can be tributaries to blindness. As we cling to the resistance of careful reluctance to move through life without putting up walls, that our acts of rebellion create the exact wall we seek to dismantle. That, in our acknowledging to the promise of the Titanics that promised a voyage toward progress, us cabooses let the wheels steer toward the icebergs we so wish to preserve. As we mutually sink into a rising sea, unaware that our caboose has been so hurt—as, historically, our history books do outline the traumas of generations. However, I have observed many do so a-historically to our personals lives. As they do not bring the caboose-d view, putting in direct light the darkness between what was lost and who we are today. The soul of the matter.
Though can we see how these cabooses, these places of darkness that always follow and embody ends (as ends are often 'dead'). The challenge, truly, is peering into the dark unknown as if gazing at the treasure chests of ancestry only waiting to be opened?
And that to dive into this dark is to nourish our souls. As this apocalypse of trans-isiton can only emerge from a remembering and a face-ing towards it. For, to efface the maces of modernity, we need to de-spike the traumatic marks of the individual. Could it be said that we have so hid from ourselves that we have spawned this death of darkened places? Forgetting the dark widens and speckles our souls in star, and in the gravity of its darkness, the nocturnal brings galaxies of spaciousness to the narrowness of our souls... that gravity falls and contracts upon itself only to pick ourselves up and dusted to fall fiercely into truth only revealed in the unknown—only certain when we embrace uncertainty. That is the terra incognita we need to chart—as the map-less is the only antidote, however with its appearance as venom, to a mind that maps in borders, keys (the deliberate locking of others from receiving), and separates.
Though, is this crypsis, this self-protective concealment, unfortunate or furthermore revealing? As the Latin fortunatus springs from the meaning of lucky, prosperous, and the blessed... though what daft could we have as we so embody this punk that struggles to love even ourselves. And how can we say that we are healthy in a culture which spokesperson of wealth is of hurting ourselves in the name of growth.
And, strictly speaking, how can we even say to have any meeting with 'healthcare' when we cannot extend our definitions to health outside of ourselves, close relations, and profit? As we nurture a sickening Earth that is on the path to self-destruction. The health we care about has become so narrow. Enclosed and boxed within this enclosed skull-ish kingdoms and so contracted from a health expanded. For any meeting of health lies beyond any measurement of who may deserve healing, as we all need healing lest we hurt other parts of ourselves. For, as Walt Whitman has observed, we contain multitudes yet I would venture far to say we are the multitudes that sometimes we are so shocked and unwoven by.
Moreover, there is something so revealing in this fortunate crypsis. As a crypsis left unhidden would blind us in the terror of truly facing ourselves naked (The same way, in Kung Fu Panda, the protagonist Po was shocked that the scroll of the Dragon Warrior simply revealed something already present, acting as a literal mirror and reflection). This crypsis, too, reveals something about who we are in this state of psuedo-idenfication. I say psuedo as we latch onto these adjectives and theorizings of immigration and citizenship that we forget what is indigenous to our souls.
And what is indigenous to our souls is the loss of wider selves that so deeply integrate their grief of the longing to remembering and re-embody the love that once was in the communities that once were. And that challenge of opening that wound and bringing imagination that so tears our worlds apart, as we realize the stretch and crack that cymbal such a deep and wide chasm. And despite this, we dive into this crack, being the trouble of the world, knowing that if we do not create the friction that could first deviate the world's wheel away from the iceberg of death. As deviation is the first step towards changing the course of the world's pain either transmitted or transformed.
And deviate off the course does not come from pained rebellion but from a compassion that can hold both sides of the matter in both hands. To hold both sides of pain knowing that pain cymbals together as a symbol of the mutuality of violence and togetherness that undergirds of actions. No matter how separate we may see ourselves to be. Yet, this deviation—or de-rangement as we uncork those congested, congealed ranges of who we believe we are—only springs from the winters of dark.
Darkness places the canvas'd ocean to which light waves. And in the same way that the Dead Sea is buoyant, death can allow us to float and some may buoy to the length that death allows us to fly. And to be born to dark, baptizing waters. Verbiage is beyond the point, as it can identified that death is freeing freed of its incarceration of a terminal point, an end point in which there is no return.
With all this talk of darkness, I shine to Francis Weller, soul-finder and guider, who acknowledge the background of the word darkness:
And darkness is another word, I think, that needs a lot of, Reclaiming. Because it's been in its bifurcation, in its polarity.
Light good, dark bad, up good, down bad.
One can see this with how our fundamental rites of passage have shifted, transformed, and metamorphosized (under intense heat and pressure) into 'rights' of passage. Where our congruence and accordance to some truth, signified by progress, growth, measured typically tracked in expressions of GPA, income, general tracking, and GDP's fundamentally have shifted our sense of belonging to be isolated.
To be separated in that sharp numerical. Where its pointing towards goals, dreams, and hopes is also a point of pain. As we measure ourselves rather than meet ourselves.
In Franics Weller's adage: there is so much entrenched bog of how up is good and down is bad. And that to embrace down would be to entangle ourselves with vines from ever reaching back to the up. As in our culture, whether it meets our needs or not, we are placed in a place of competition rather than community. Where we need to fight rather than to love.
And to reclaim this portal of darkness that may seem like a dreadful abyss is to embody the love we often so fight. To see princesses, helpless, waiting to be saved rather than the dragons we so seek to slay and create. And, however Francis Weller may observe it is our love for the dark that has so escaped us, I want to bring another observation.
Many may speak to the loss of art in our culture. With the commodification of our creativity, sound, and canvas expanded even to how we commodify ourselves. As we view ourselves in the unsatisfactoriness of a consumer, likes and dislikes, never to be satisfied with these blemished bodies. Yet, one may say that we have not lost artistry and artisanship but alchemy.
And alchemy is akin to a cold shower mid-winter. A reversal of what we hold so near and dear to on the skins of yes and no. As alchemy births in creating things with no warranty. Loving things in an eternal as homage to creationary change and worn-ness of a used lacquer that decorates and transforms.
Alchemy often takes place in the places most sickening, in nigredo or a period of deep darkness, as those are the places where healing can take place. And those are the places that light is most distinct. As in that deep cold of meeting ourselves bare, naked, and tormented by the pain we so inflict ourselves. We lay torn, fully at those bleeding edges and facing the bitterness, rage, and vitality of the wounds that only heal at edges. There is this scream if we infuse into the throbbing ache of our longing to heal, love, and decompose those collapsing parts of ourselves.
As these cold showers that so weather us in a climate in collapse only infuriate those parts of myself so a part of the Great Dying. As the I screams for the soul, there is a gelato in licking into a soul so nourishing in tender to the dust and smallness we so are used to allocating ourselves. As though our souls may be small, they are wide. They are immense to contain all the multitudes of creatures, un-creatures, and the relatives of sun, star, and moon that all orbit us in love—no matter how much it may hurt in their convergence.
To tap into those beetroots of pain is to remove our protective shells towards what brings us invulnerable fortitude that is also fragile and vulnerable. As no two sides are split in alchemy. And to tap into the tickling goosebumps and chills that come when we feel most drinking the taps and wellsprings of life. Those vernal pools of spring that only come after a winter of darkness.
And if we re-searching the architecture of pain and the Soul, one can see how allowing and holding pain unwarps the tourniquet of the mind. Turning the turnip and ringing the rose. There is a sacredness to our pain if we know how to honor it un-incognita to the immensity that we are.
And to connect this puzzle to the piecing of polymath Peter Kingsley, he was once reported to express:
And there’s a great secret: we all have that vast missingness deep inside us. The only difference between us and the mystics is that they learn to face what we find ways of running away from. That’s the reason why mysticism has been pushed to the periphery of our culture: because the more we feel that nothingness inside us, the more we feel the need to fill the void.... We’ve been taught in so many ways to escape from ourselves.[1]
How can we un-escape ourselves when turn face to and realize the winning, victory, and progress we so deeply seek is re-incarceration in our own keep?
In the same way how the only way out is in, can we be embrace those cold showers that create the I screams to the souls that emerge only through the depths of the dark? For these pains we are going through, are growing—growing pains that are the very rites of initiation in the holy we so need.
- [1]
- Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Point Reyes: The Golden Sufi Center, 2019), 34-35, 67. (Back to text)