Just  because RoD reflections have come to a close this year doesn’t mean you have to wait until next winter to continue reflecting. The Reflections on Darkness project will be available to you for free as a PDF eBook.

If you’d like to grab a copy, go to the RoD Facebook Page and send a message with your email address. Once the final touches are done to the book, it will be sent to you!

Peace + Rest,

Brianna Kocka

“It’s cold

it’s dark

it’s prehistoric

the way the snow sticks to the tree’s branches

so I you-tube the warmth and sunshine.”

Forgive me for feeling like Helen Keller, but it’s the first day of the New Year and I’m in the thick of the North Country. It’s nine-thirty, maybe ten o’clock pm and a few good friends and I have stocked the wood stoves and supper is being served. The soup is hot, the bread is sliced, the salad is green and cheesy and cold and the peppers await us stewed on our plates. We’ve turned out all the lodge lights, and extinguished the table candles’ flames. It is as dark as we can possibly make it. We sit giggling unable to distinguish the familiar forms around us. We dig in. Our forks are first to go, we abandon them to use our hands instead; our fingers scramble the table in search of the carafe of wine. Some of us close our eyes, some stare into the black, and others look down at the table where usually the plates and bowls would be visibly spilling over with delightful entrees. We pass bread at the wanting voices.

What a new experience, a slight, dull moon and star glow pressing through the patio window and from the cracks of doors while the foods’ flavors excel and intensify, the cinnamon spice, beans and citrus hints warming the body and soul as I search my salad for an olive and handfuls of fried plantains are pressed into my palm from another palm and my tongue dances with the sweet and sensual yogurt sauce; the party laughs, stuffing, slurping, sucking, we devour dinner, joking of our primitiveness, we finish with no eyeing the second helpings. Our bellies full, there’s no picking at the scraps thinking; “I’ll just finish this off so it does not go to waste”, but that “I’m full–I’m contented.” With no one watching I lift my plate and lick it clean completely satisfied with this visionless supper prepared with love by myself and my friends. I sigh, we light a candle and the single flame seems as luminescent as sun rise while my vision awakes to the table of smiling faces.

It’s dark

It’s cold

It changes, darkness in the light, light where there’s darkness.

Can we even see our own darkness? It shrouds us so that we walk around blinded, ignorant of the shadows we cast as we go.

A Thursday night, driving home from an evening lit by conversation and laughter over a shared meal. My husband Jeremy points out the way I have just cut off and insulted a friend, thinking only of myself. I can’t see it. I protest and defend, explain and excuse, insisting on my own unflickering light, clawing back the darkness of an accusation that threatens to snuff out for me the evening’s warm flame.

But thank God for the light of another’s eyes – faltering though it may be, though we all are. My mind’s eye cannot turn away from our friend’s turned-down gaze remembered, nor from the painful truth shining clear in Jeremy’s eyes. In the dark of the car, I finally allow myself to see the light, the light of my own darkness: that blindly insisting on my own desires over those of another has darkened my thoughts, making my actions and words ugly and small-minded. And the truth I am trying the hardest to ignore? That this darkness is not some strange anomaly or momentary lapse; it is part of me. Hesitatingly, I confess what I have fought not to see; his eyes brighten and he thanks me. The darkness does not entirely disappear but I have admitted the light of truth, and opened myself to the light of forgiveness and loving acceptance from another. I find that my shadows have not overtaken me and do not need to define me.

I have spent too much of my life trying to hide parts of myself that I consider dark, undesirable, unacceptable or unlovable. I have tried to hide from others and to hide from God. But maybe all my hiding has really been from myself. It is myself I do not want to look in the eye.

But why? Why do I even attempt to hide from these very real parts of myself?

I hide because I believe that my darkness (or what I consider darkness) must be hidden. I hide because I believe certain parts of me – too shadowy or, ironically, too brilliant – cannot be loved. And this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, for what I never reveal, never admit, can never be loved.

A Sunday morning, still dark. I wake up from a brief, simple, but horrifying, dream: my small daughter is locked in our empty apartment upstairs and she is screaming with terror. She is abandoned, unheard, isolated and utterly terrified. I feel this fear myself, immediately and viscerally, and all I want to do is rescue and protect her. But when the light of dawn breaks and I reflect more consciously on this dream, I have the sense that my daughter represents myself, or the parts of myself that I have shut away because I am afraid to let them be seen. But this precious, beautiful and inevitably flawed part of me does not want to be locked away, living in my house and yet cut off from life; she is crying and screaming out to be heard, found and embraced. And only I can do this.

So, every day, I try to unlock the doors that separate and isolate: by trying to apologize promptly and unreservedly to my beloveds when my shadows twist themselves into shapes that wound; by being brave enough to ask a friend if I’ve offended her, ready for whatever the answer may be; by making regular space for honest self-reflection and prayer; by daring to speak of the thing that I am secretly passionate about or that I feel should not be bothering me quite this much; by trying to reveal rather than veil my beauty, my gift, my strength, while not denying my weakness and my uncertainty. And though the key can feel hard to turn – the lock rusty with shame and fear – once unlocked I am surprised by the easy swing of an insubstantial door, and by the rush of light and love that always greets me, where I thought there was only a lonely and fearful darkness.

And so, choice by choice, my house – my self – is gradually becoming a seamless whole.

In me there is light and there is darkness.

And there is nothing to fear.

Was not my heart burning within me
Was my soul on fire
Were not the words opened up within me
Was my soul on fire
When he spoke freely

Did not we dance upon the road
Did our mouths not sing
Did not he hold my hand on the open road
Did I not sing
When he spoke freely
When he stayed

Leave the stone
Leave the grave
Forsake, leave the stone
Leave to stay

The night has come
My light has gone away
But here you are
Stay with me

Even death, even the night
Cannot have your dead body
We’ll be eating bread, be drinking wine,
Be toasting our sad memories

The night has come
My light had gone away
But here you are
And here you’ll stay
Stay with me

Does the seed rejoice
when it loses sight of light?
When it is buried
slowly
underneath the earth?
Comfort
in its dark embrace?

Does it understand?
Holy mystery;
potential release;
hull shudder,
creaking,
cracking in the unseen?

Does it feel life’s pull?
Push towards the warmth,
the calling of sun?
Burrow deeper in,
deeper
down
into the richness, the intimate earth?

Pathways through sky and stone,
we push ever further,
into unknown, with unseen force
into the depths and into the heights,
light displays our growth
as darkness conceals it’s source.

“No art is possible without a dance with death.”

Kurt Vonnegut

The dark chill of a winter in the upper Midwest has a profound impact on the mind; as if the loss of warmth and light begins to form cracks in the walls around our psyche—cracks just big enough to let errant thoughts slip through.

I’ve had them before—morose fantasies of driving out into the night and finding the perfect country road in the middle of the vast white fields, pulling over, turning off the engine, and filling my mind with silence. I could fall asleep under the stars and let the cold night carry me away. On the stillest of nights, I’ve been drawn to the inky-black lake water that I know is too cold to fight. The thought of slipping into the cold darkness has seemed comforting at times.

These images are only passing, like a sudden memory flooding my mind, only to recede as a wave into the nothingness. But instead of reading these thoughts as premonitions or suggestions, I see them as beacons of a simpler truth: winter as death is not a despairing delusion. It is an inevitability, a fact. A marker in our temporal perceptions.

For as long as animals have had thoughts in their heads, they have been aware of the changing of seasons; the parting of springs’ vibrancy and determination for summers’ languid follies and freedom. There has never been any question as to whether winter will come again. Man, bird, and snake have all seen the trees go dormant, the lakes freeze up, and the landscape tucked under the cold blanket of winter. What else could it be but death?

Being caught in the cyclical whirlwind of time doesn’t seem to have rubbed off much on our young species. Every year we fight and curse and dig in our heels. We are determined to make it through winter unscathed. We try to continue on with our lives, futility pretending that the world around us isn’t dying. But we must embrace death! We must allow ourselves to die a little to make room for new spring growth.

Death after all is only the act of relenting to time and submitting to the transient nature of our mortality. Our bodies are relegated to dust; our minds quieted and stilled. The energy in our atoms is assigned a new purpose. If we allow it, winter could be the death of our egos; the cleaning out of old wounds; the cleansing of our minds. In this, death could be the compost for new ideas.

When I have grave visions of walking coatless into a snow-blanketed forest, I smile to myself. I know I have just cleaned something out, done away with an unnecessary grudge, or calmed my mind. The dark of winter is a time when I can reflect on my life, and make room for life to come. It is only in the darkness that we can turn our vision within, and it is only when we look within that we can project the best version of ourselves outward.

I’ve lived in Minnesota my whole life. I’m used to cold lonely winters with bleak nights
that seem to stretch on for life-times, or at least I should be. And yet every November
I’m reminded what a difference a little bit of sunlight can make. The dusk comes earlier
and earlier, and as the daytime wanes, often my mood is swept along with it.

In the spring, everyone’s legs start to ambulate in strange ways, carrying them to new
and exciting destinations. The air is fresh and every breeze carries the scent of endless
possibility. Smiles start to appear more readily, not just around the mouth, but in the
corner’s of the eyes, beaming and hopeful. On patios and in parks you can hear talk
of new plans and ambitious ventures. Imaginations are running wild, and the future is
just waiting for us to dream it up. While talk is cheap, and meaningless chatter is easy
to come by, something seems different in April and May. Along with the awakening of
the earth to the warmth of the sun, the mind seems to thaw, exposing the raw potential
that’s been there all along.

Flash forward to the end of January, it’s just past New Years but not quite Valentine’s
Day. Whimsey is a little harder to come by as of late. Those same feet that celebrated
the coming of summer now trudge from home to work and back again. Faces look pale
and expressionless, and discussions of glamorous endeavors are faded memories.
Many who have enough money fly to warmer climates to escape the gloom for a couple
weeks. Those with a hobby get lost in their craft, relying on busyness to ward off the
doldrums. Countless more stay inside gorging themselves on carbohydrates and
starches, pissing away their time in front of the television.

In the midwest, the juxtaposition between our extremes in weather can be comical.
On the other hand, the effect it can have on the psyche is not always a laughing
matter. Some folks seem more impervious to the change, but it never goes unnoticed.
Many are left to wonder where their inspiration went, blaming the frigid temperatures
or the snow piling up in the streets. It’s pointless to deny the wisdom of nature, it’s
cyclical patterns and seasons. Each one has it’s place, and each is due it’s respect.
Appreciation for the warmer months can be effortless, but rest and relaxation is just
as important as activity. Yet as in most things, there is a balance to be struck. The
dark winter nights encourage a certain amount of hibernation, but it can quickly slip
into apathetic passivity. There are those of us who easily fall into depressive states,
allowing the weather to get the best of our motivation. The grey sky seems to be a
painful reminder of our inner landscape, lacking vibrancy and joy.

Every problem has it’s solution, but when it comes to understanding something as
complex as the mind and human emotions, the puzzle can be daunting. I’ve come
to believe that much of the secret lies in the thoughts we entertain. Most things we experience in life, be it the weather or otherwise, are out of our direct control. One
thing is certain though, we are solely responsible for our thoughts. Sure, it’s true that
we can be swayed in our opinions by a convincing argument, but it’s still a choice. It’s
always easier to stay positive when things are going our way, but we all know that it
doesn’t last long. Instead of resisting or complaining about what we cannot change,
we will find a greater peace simply by accepting it. Often what we perceive as chaos
in our lives is nothing more than shortsightedness on our part. Usually it isn’t until we
have time to reflect back on the past that we see the correlations. So, in all things, a
little bit of faith is necessary. Take comfort knowing that so long as we make the best
of every situation, there will be forward motion. Our greatest trials become our greatest
triumphs. Anything that isn’t growing or evolving, is dying and becoming extinct. We
can succumb to apathy and entropy, or we can embrace the growing pains and refuse
to let circumstance dictate the quality of our lives. Even in our darkest hour, that same
raw potential is always there, waiting for us to set it into motion.

I work at an outdoor science school. 5th and 6th graders from the Los Angelus area come to the mountains of the San Bernardino National Forest and it is my job to teach them about photosynthesis, the water cycle, and astronomy. During the early fall months and late spring, astronomy is taught while the sky is still a dusky blue and constellations are mentioned in theory. However, in the wintertime the children step outside of their cabins for evening classes and are greeted by a host of “fire-folk sitting in the air” (poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ wondrous way of describing stars).

Before I start my astronomy class I always have them lie down on their backs and look, unmoving and silent, up at the stars. For some of them, this is the first time they have seen a night sky unpolluted by city lights.

During the daylight hours we have all kinds of fun exploring the forest: unearthing bugs, hugging trees, etc. I am actively trying to get these children to engage with their environment; I am mediator between small-human and Nature. But in the darkness, when my students are taking-in this canopy of “old light”—I explain to them that the light from the nearest star traveled about four years to get to our eyes here on earth and, that some starlight has journeyed billions of years to reach our retinas, hence the expression, “old light.” Then there is a moment when it is just them, and something more.

That “something more” is something that I do not try to define for them. The impulse to define and dictate the wonders of this strange world so often lead us to push our conclusions upon others, especially children. I try to avoid that. I would rather them feel the mysteries of existence on the skin of their face. I want it to flood their eyes from a billion light years away.

I look at the stars too, during those few moments of quiet and beauty. No one defines or dictates to me either, and I find myself in awe all over again at the time and distance that it took for old light to reach us in this moment. I feel myself small and fragile, and yet somehow miraculously alive and a part of something more than what I can fathom. This world with its beauty and brokenness is not easily explained. I have stopped looking for an explanation. Instead, I am keeping my eyes open for lights in the darkness, and my soul open to something more.

During the winter months, the North is replete with darkness. Darkness invades and it pervades. It is resolute. For weeks on end, the only lights that continually shine are the stars and even the starts are no match for the endless empty space. The moon remains steadfast in the sky; reminding those below that the sun still exists—somewhere beyond the horizon it shines, unmoving. One’s helplessness against the darkness is founded on a forgetting. As winter trudges on, it is difficult to remember that summer will come. Eventually, the Northern Lands will be constantly bathed in a golden light. The Land of the Midnight Sun will shine once again. It is easy to forget that reality when the pitch and the wind work as one to saturate one’s bones with a heaviness that seemingly will not lift. The frigid air overwhelms one’s lungs and freezes one’s heart until it seems that it will beat no longer.

It is common to wonder why one would choose to live in such a deeply dark, cold place. Until one night, the endless black is broken. Great Lights breaks free from somewhere that is unseen. At first, just a whisper of green, the Lights soon begins to grow. They bathe the dark Land in a magical luminescence, which flows between the sparse trees and over the vast, frozen lakes, into the igloos and the teepees, the houseboats and the plywood cabins, into the houses and the apartment buildings. Their radiance is awesome to behold: green, purple, white, blue, red, yellow—the spectrum is endless. The Lights move and dance across the sky, calling, “Here is Life! Here is Life! Northern Lands, come live again!” As the Aurora Borealis streaks across sky, something magical happens: people come out of their homes and answer the intoxicating call of the Lights. The bright colours of night burn bright and true overhead, feedings hearts with Light that had been absent for so long. The Lights rouse something in the people that live beneath them: hope. The people of the Northern Lands breathe in Life once again.

Like Penelope’s tapestry, however, the Lights must unravel and retreat back into the indefinable, cavernous darkness that they came from. It is at once extremely disappointing and indescribably wonderful to watch the Aurora leave again. I can only describe the Northern Lights as a gift from God during the interminable darkness of winter. They are a display of Love that is unique and beautiful. The darkness is a strange incubator of the Northern Lights, for they are a gift that can only come in the midst of extreme darkness. Indeed, as they take flight, they are ultimately a reminder that light only exists in contrast to the darkness. Without the darkness and its great mysteries, we would not be able to fully appreciate the gift of Lights.