Muskan Verma
Professor Cynthia Baker
FYS 445: Nature of Spirituality
Friday, December 1, 2017.
A Storm of Darkness in Nature
I slept through the light and woke up in Darkness.
The Darkness doesn’t scare me. I smell fear on its way.
The Darkness fascinates me. I was taught to fear it.
The Darkness scares me now. And now I am awake, sadly.
The dark is a deeply complex and impenetrable element of nature.
Nature is deep and complicated.
Beauty lies in complexity.
In Darkness, there is nothing but the dark. The simplicity of it baffles me.
In Nature “there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only…”
We are a part of Nature’s simplicity and complexity present in each of its elements.
Beauty lies in simplicity.
I decide to take a walk. In the Darkness of the night, I leave light behind. I should be scared by now. I am in an unfamiliar place and all alone. My only companion is Darkness, and I learned it is scary.
The silence is deafening. Nature screams into me and I stop. I decide to sit down in the middle of a field, an unfamiliar spot that was becoming familiar in the discomfort of Darkness. At least I wasn’t alone.
The grass is wet. My clothes soak up the water and I am cold now. The cool breeze makes me shiver. The breeze travelled over the waters. I look towards the dark waters. They roar with a sense of calm. It contains the less and the more, the crashing waves and the quiet tides, complexity and simplicity.
“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place.”
“The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea. On the ebb tide it knows the harsh extremes of the land world, being exposed to heat and cold, to wind, to rain and drying sun. On the flood tide it is a water world, returning briefly to the relative stability of the open sea.”
Stability.
Calm.
Quiet.
These are all the things I find when I am surrounded by nature. These are also the things that I find in the presence of Darkness. Getting away from the intensity of a castle full of teenagers from around the world sometimes turns into hiding in the solace of darkness and connecting with the silently screaming waters.
My mind races faster than the waves crash on the rocks. Faster than the speed of light.
Faster than the speed of Darkness.
Stability.
I have forgotten what it means to feel just enough. It has been too long. My thoughts are like the sea on bad days, never still where I may look at my reflection. My mind is filled with the sounds of silence that speak way more than I would like to hear.
Faster than the speed of Darkness. Nature is never silent, yet I don’t hear much noise. The music of nature is oftentimes within us and it is easier to hear it when we are not trying too hard to listen in.
“The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out. But God knows I have tried.”
Mystery:
A hidden or secret thing; something inexplicable or beyond human comprehension; a person or thing evoking awe or wonder but not well known or understood; an enigma.
A puzzle, a conundrum.
I have tried to understand myself.
I need to understand myself.
Nature is a mystery waiting to be solved.
Is it?
“The self is a metaphor. We can choose to limit it to our skin, or person, our family, our organization, our species. We can select its boundaries in objective reality.”
Nature: Middle English (denoting the physical power of a person): from Old French, from Latin natura ‘birth, nature, quality,’ from nat- ‘born,’ from the verb nasci.
I am Nature. I do not understand it.
The grandeur of nature is not easy to understand and when I see myself as part of nature, I see the complexities that are in me. I retain the beauty of nature in my genetic make-up. Just as I see myself as part of nature, I also see nature as a part of myself.
I do not understand nature and I do not understand myself, but I feel her power and I feel my power- we are made of the same elements. Nature birthed me.
So, I ask myself again: Do all mysteries need to be solved?
“執事元是迷 Grasping at things is surely delusion;
契理亦非悟 according with sameness is still not enlightenment.”
Nature is full of paradoxes; multiple truths exist for us to explore.
I turn my attention back to Darkness as I look up into the night sky.
Light followed me here; in some respects. Small specks of light, twinkling sometimes.
They are too far away and cannot do anything for the dark inside.
I am still cold. They don’t give enough heat.
It is baffling that there are so many stars and such less light. It is strange that there isn’t more heat in the dark night.
“Why are the heavens not filled with light? Why is the universe plunged into darkness?”
I am not the only one baffled by this mystery. The Dark Night Sky paradox is one that had baffled scientists and philosophers for a long time.
In an endless forest of trees, “our view in any horizontal direction is eventually blocked by tree trunks.” With this analogy, if stars stretch endlessly in space, then our view in any direction should also be eventually blocked by stars and their light. This means that at night, the entire sky should be covered with stars. “Yet the sky at night is dark.”
“The dark night sky is in conflict with an infinite universe of stars.” There are too many different theories explaining this and making many assumptions. In recent years, the popular belief has settled on the theory explaining the infinite expansion of the universe, which cancels out the infinite light. Hence, our night is full of light. Is there anything to be afraid of then?
You have always been taught to fear the dark, fear the night and what is in it. Is it the absence of light that scares us?
We know night for its darkness while it has the potential to be full of light. In fact, if the light were to come to its full potential, it would result in the earth evaporating in a few years.
There is enough heat.
“Long ago, when the universe was young and brimmed with energy, the primordial heavens blazed with fierce light. The once-brilliant light of the early universe has gone, cooled a thousand-fold by cosmic expansion and transformed into an infrared gloom invisible to the naked eye.”
I have tried understanding Darkness. I keep trying to understand Nature.
Yet, I do not understand my need to understand. Myself.
The balance in nature is beautiful and essential and our acceptance of it is like the expanding universe, it will have no limits because we cannot limit nature’s mysteries.
Darkness doesn’t feel cold and frightening to me now. And unsolvable mysteries are beginning to look less threatening.
“Darkness is a resource and an environmental condition that is as important as light to almost all living organisms.”
It gives organisms the time and the break to mend and recover. Evolution connects with and depends on darkness, more specifically the cycles of light and dark.
A storm. That is how quiet it gets in my head.
It destroys me.
“I came to the great field, fireflies rising from the black grass. I say to no one:”
Sometimes organisms produce their own light in response to the darkness around them. Their life processes are now dependent on the darkness.
Nature never conveyed that the night and the Darkness are a threat.
I see myself in Nature and I see the disturbing mysteries of my mind in the darkness. These mysteries are a part of me.
“Nature never puts on a mean appearance.”
Light and dark are two faces of the same entity and while some life forms learnt to make light their haven, some depended on the dark. The cycle affects species in both realms.
Balance.
Nature provides for the merging of these worlds.
When have I shied away from the dawn or the dusk? The balance in the colours of nature in these merged moments, promise infinite beauty and it calls for you to take the plunge of faith and explore both these worlds.
The storm in my mind is raging like the billion stars that live within the dark.
It is what destroys me.
It is what makes “Me.”
Like darkness, there is both a haven and a threat within this storm that rages inside me. Accepting my darkness is accepting nature’s darkness.
I hold Darkness’s hand. I am not afraid now, gladly.
I am like Nature. I am like Darkness.
My mind is a mystery needing to be understood accepted.
Faith:
Mid-13c., faith, feith, fei, fai "faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness," from Anglo-French and Old French feid, foi "faith, belief, trust, confidence; pledge" (11c.), from Latin fides "trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief," from root of fidere "to trust," from PIE root *bheidh- "to trust, confide, persuade."
I take a plunge of faith and explore light and dark. Both realms smile at me.
I am never silent. I hear too much.
I never rest.
Anxiety never rests.
Nature doesn’t need rest. It keeps going without an explanation for its Darkness; I have so much to learn from it.
“Reaching out, I find a simple way to begin a conversation.”
I close my eyes when I want to close myself from the world. I also close my eyes when I want to open myself to the world. The darkness has this strange sense of comfort in the disconnect it provides that I find myself connecting to a lot more than I would in the bright lights with my eyes wide open. Darkness within vision comes from closing our eyes. Even in complete darkness, eye closure “results in improved somatosensory perception due to a switch from visual predominance towards a somatosensory processing mode.” In this case, our touch takes on even a more important role than before. Sometimes, this is exactly what you need. To take that plunge of faith and understand things deeply and let nature control you instead of the other way around. To let the power of touch, prevail over vision and not just “see” things differently, but accept them as different.
Closing your eyes in the dark doesn’t improve perception merely due to the “lack of visual signals, instead the act of closing the eyes itself alters the processing made in the brain: with eye closure the brain switches from thalamo-cortical networks with visual dominance to a non-visually dominated processing mode.”
Sometimes, the darkness outside isn’t enough, you need the darkness inside of you to be awakened. The light doesn’t always make things easier to see, sometimes the brightness can blind you to what lies beyond it.
(From Bruce Cockburn’s song “Pacing the Cage”:
“Sometimes the best map will not guide you You can't see what's round the bend Sometimes the road leads through dark places Sometimes the darkness is your friend.”)
Nature is a great teacher:
I am both dark and light.
I am both the storm and the calm.
I am both silence and sound, both music and noise.
I am all these faces, at once.
Complexity is beautiful.
Simplicity is beautiful. And beauty lies in finding all these things within ourselves, by accepting nature as our guiding beacon.
On my way back, I stop to take a dip in the cold dark waters of the Bristol Channel. My mysteries soak in while the voices still follow me.
I am cold but there is a beauty in it. I can see my reflection even among ripples.
I had always tried to understand everything- more than it has been possible sometimes. I tried to understand myself and my relationship with nature, but I forgot to acknowledge the many parts I will never understand, and the many that I will never even come across. I tried to understand myself, but I failed to concede with the many storms raging inside of me that cannot be touched.
Walking along one of the many Welsh coastal paths, I developed a relationship with the coast. I found company in the cool waters in the Bristol channel and comfort in the clear night skies. While my storms never stopped raging, the strong Welsh winds soothed me until my skin was cold and my body left in shivers. The cliff at the edge of which I spent many sunsets and sunrises is an exhibit of the memories I associate with that place. I learnt to hate the cold and dark Welsh weather when it brought out all the sadness inside of me in the brutal winter, when I dare not touch the waters for they could bite. Yet, I did; and nature let me. I grew to love the scenic beauty that I will never find anywhere else and the beautiful sky at night and in the day. Most importantly though, I understood the need to revel in my love and hate; for both brought out so much passion from the depths of my heart that my relationship with nature grew stronger.
Once this passion was found, I learnt to accept the mysteries within myself. I reveled in love and hate that I feel for myself and I am content in not being able to touch these raging storms.
Acceptance doesn’t come easy. Nature pushes you and tests you until you are ready, and sometimes you never are. But the beauty lies in the journey you make. Nature taught me to look deeper into darkness and find the beauty in it.
“In the light there is darkness,
but don't take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light,
but don't see it as light.
Light and dark oppose one another
like the front and back foot in walking.
Each of the myriad things has its merit,
expressed according to function and place.
Phenomena exist; box and lid fit;
principle responds; arrow points meet.
Hearing the words, understand the meaning;
don't set up standards of your own.
If you don't understand the Way right before you,
how will you know the path as you walk?
Progress is not a matter of far or near,
but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.
I respectfully urge you who study the mystery,
do not pass your days and nights in vain.”
I feel ready to leave the comfortable company of the cold water.
Dripping, I walk again back into that from which I escaped. The sun will scorch my skin and I have accepted it.
I may have overlooked the darkness between the stars but now that I have been introduced to it, I will remember it as one of nature’s many unsolvable mysteries.
As the night comes to an end, daylight wakes me into the nature inside of me.
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