Learning to Walk in the Dark
Format: 📖 Book
Overall impression:
Really great reframing of the dark, darkness, and sitting with it, talking to it, and welcoming it.
Notes
Dark Night of the Soul
John knows there is more than one kind of darkness out there. He makes a distinction between tinieblas, the kind of darkness you would be wise to turn away from, and oscura, which simply means obscure, or difficult to see. Clinical depression should not be mistaken for the dark night, May says, though the two can overlap. Like tinieblas, depression can take people apart without putting them back together again, while la noche oscura is for healing. To paraphrase another writer on the negative way, when depression passes, all is restored; when the dark night passes, all is transformed.
Yet it would be a mistake to attach the promise of more spiritual benefits to a night that is designed to obliterate them.
Those who have come through dark nights of their own, not just once but over and over again, often cannot find the words to say why they would not trade those nights for anything. Yes, they were nights of great loss. Yes, the soul suffered from fearful subtraction. Yes, a great emptiness opened up where I had stored all my spiritual treasures, and yet. And yet what? And yet what remarned when everything else was gone was more real than anything I could bave imagined. I was no longer apart from what I sought; I was part of it, or in it. I’m sorry I can’t say it any better than that. There was no place else I wanted to be.