When we lived in the blue house and my parents were dying, our film deals falling through, our income was drying up, and we were peddling as fast as we could, our breathing became shallow. As the sun was rising every morning, before we catapulted out of bed, we would say to each other “The darkest hour is just before dawn, surely this is the darkest hour”.
Five years later and randomly here and there, we still greet each other with this, now laughingly.
The darkness that once felt like gloom has become something else. It has become our living space, it has lost its soul stopping power, it has become our teacher.
Last week, on a walk up into the Los Angeles hills, in a moment of thrashing discomfort with ‘unknowingness’ a voice in my head said these words again. Our human walk asks for miracles, instant pop throughs into a new place of relief and new direction. Our spiritual walk recognizes that there is a choice in every second, with every breath, to experience either darkness or light. One can be in what our brains recognize as darkness, whether it is physical pain, or financial scarcity, or lost love, or plummeting career, or separation from loved ones, or crushed dreams, and on and on and choose to turn on the light. This light switch muscle, love and acceptance infused, which at first feels laborious and confusing, with practice becomes a way of being. Darkness is looked at and honored and moved through. And so the darkest hour and dawn are fused, inside and out.
And now we breathe deeply, regularly.