Anam Cara

The Bright Night of the Earth

Yet the eye can become accustomed to the dark. Country people know this well. When a city person moves to a rural region, she is often overwhelmed by the darkness of the night. Houses shine out like beacons, but all roads and fields are buried in pitch darkness. She discovers how brightly and magically the night sky shines through. With no light pollution, the stars and moon perforate the night with such lucid brightenings. When you leave a lighted room and go out into the night, you are almost totally lost and blind at first. Then, as your eyes grow more accustomed to the night, the outlines of things begin to loom more clearly; shadowed presences become visible. There is an inner depth and texture to darkness that we never notice until we have to negotiate the absence of light.

It is no wonder then that Nature supplies the most appropriate metaphors for the spiritual life of the mind. The fecundity of such metaphors is their capacity to disclose the slow creativity of the dark. The darkness is the cradle of growth. Everything that grows has to succumb to darkness first. All death is a return to darkness. When you sow seeds, you commit them to the dark. It must be a shock for seeds to find themselves engulfed in the black smother of clay. They are helpless and cannot resist the intricate dissolution which the earth will practise on them. The seed has no defence; it must give way, abandoning itself to the new weave of life that will thread forth from its own dissolving. A new plant will gradually rise, observing the ancient symmetry of growth: root farther into darkness and rise towards the sun. When the new plant breaks the surface of the ground, it is a gift of the hidden wisdom of the clay. She knows the mystery of growth. This wisdom finds such solid expression in trees.