I am tired of emotional and spiritual metaphors and references that equate lightness with everything good, and darkness with everything bad. This doesn’t make sense to me on an emotional or a spiritual level.
Yes, the light can be energizing, joyful, illuminating, warm, and healing. Yes, the dark can be frightening, isolating, and depressing.
But also, light can be harsh, painful, and exhausting. And darkness can be soft, rich, soothing, sensual, restful, and regenerative.
As always, it is all about balance. Both are healing, both are beautiful, both are otherworldly. Both can be painful and challenging. But we need both. This is true literally and it’s true spiritually.
And it is not a coincidence that worshipping lightness and demonizing darkness mirrors the white supremacist ideology that is responsible for the brutal oppression of non-white and especially darker skinned people.
It dehumanizes us all.
Just as white supremacy has fragmented humanity, convincing us that some of us are inherently worth more than others, the privileging of the metaphorical ‘light’ over the ‘dark’ in each of us alienates us from ourselves.
For me, the darkness is everything about myself that I’ve been told is wrong, everything about myself that others have refused to see. It is what the powerful have tried to stamp out, and what my ancestors, in all their wisdom and guile, kept alive anyway. It is Depth. It is Power. It is Source.
And so, I honour the light, but I am in love with the darkness. I work to reconcile both, and bring them back into balance.