Staring at the Flame

We are coming in closer to the flame: our peripheral shrinks, our surroundings cave in on us, almost as if we were being consumed by the darkness. If we shifted our awareness to the darkness that surrounds us while focused on the candle light, we might sense fear. When the candle is there, when it is our primary focus - when we know it is simply a candle shining brightly - we are able to understand and appreciate its heat, its warmth, and know it as good. We are not afraid. We are comforted. Yet we do not learn to appreciate the darkness that surrounds it.

We have been standing far away from the flame, able to see both the light it emits and the shadows it creates. But as we journey inward, as we journey towards our own inner flame, the fear sets in, the anxiety builds. There is now so much we cannot see. The blurry edges of our vision become more and more defined, more solid and heavy. Perhaps this is the next phase of our evolution as human beings.  Inspecting the darkest corners of our beings, shifting to the primitive, the will to survive, the fight-or-flight which can sense the imminent death of our aliveness. That is what we are getting closer to. We have inspected the light closely long enough -- we know of it well. Now, are we brave enough to dive into the dark peripherals of our earth-bound existence?

"From time to time, back in the woods, that primitive wildness was there. If that's all God is, I'll settle for it. I'll settle for it easily, and thankfully." - Parker J. Palmer

We relate the darkness to fear and therefore to something holding us back, holding us down, keeping us from the light. Perhaps we must shift our view of these two opposing realities in order to start the healing process of our deeply depressed generation.

"You seem to look upon depression as the hand of an enemy trying to crush you. Do you think you could see it instead as the hand of a friend pressing you down onto ground on which it is safe to stand?" - Unknown

"Going into my experience of depression, I thought of the spiritual life as sort of climbing a mountain until you got to this high, elevated point, where you could touch the hand of God or see a vision of wholeness and beauty. The spiritual life, at that time, had nothing to do, as far as I was concerned, with going into the valley of the shadow of death. Even though that phrase is right there at the heart of my own spiritual tradition, that wasn’t what it was about for me. So on one level, you think, "This is the least spiritual thing I’ve ever done.” And the soul is absent, God is absent, faith is absent; all of the faculties that I depended on before I went into depression were now utterly useless.

And yet, as I worked my way through that darkness, I sometimes became aware that way back there in the woods, somewhere, was this sort of primitive piece of animal life — just some kind of existential reality, some kind of core of being, of my own being; I don’t know, maybe of the life force generally — and that was somehow holding out the hope of life to me. And so I now see the soul as that wild creature way back there in the woods that knows how to survive in very hard places, knows how to survive in places where the intellect doesn’t, where the feelings don’t, and where the will cannot" - Parker J. Palmer, from On Being with Krista Tippett