#4 Press Pause: Deep Dark Listening

On the cusp of the Winter Solstice, working with the deep dark in our creative lives.

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Early morning and still the night hangs soft; its mid-winter coat buttoned up, taking the waking hours with it. My day begins with fumbling; rummaging for the light. It’s how I’ve learned by sight to navigate; the familiar switch that flips the still half-dream out of the dream.

This morning, instead I try something different, stumbling into the dark and letting my feet remember their way through the room, down the stairs, eyes now adjusting with that dust-sparkle of the dark, which as a child, I totally believed were faeries visiting, and maybe they were. This half-light, this cusp of dream, this finding feet through the awakening night, it feels like memory of a forgotten skill; how to find our way, even when the light is only barely light.

As I make my way down the stairs, the silence is a dark silence, the kind of quiet that can unzip the seams of the soul and invite us in. I make my way slowly to the blank page and simply sit there awhile, its blankness catching something of the dark now too and leading me into it. The soul’s place. The hollowed ground of another form of seeing. The writing from this place is another form of listening too, straddled to places hard to reach when it is bright. Only when there are words to shape with ink do I strike a match. The flicker of flame is enough, soft glow, still tethered to the night.

Crossing the threshold of the Winter Solstice, the light is a slow return, a speed of grace, slipping like an otter into the slipstream of life’s river; too sudden and we would loose our bearings, but ludic, one foot still in the nocturnal and we are held in the dark interior. It is here that the psyche can still be in dialogue with the unknown; the not yet revealed.

In the creative life, fostering this thread across the gossamer, into that which we still don’t understand, to me is one of the most vital strands of a vibrant creative practice, for it is in reaching into the unknown that I find the gems of the hidden and buried, the un-remembered, and dare I even say it, encounter a voice so far beyond my own voice that at times it scares me with its clarity and force.

In Ireland we have this beautiful idea of ‘thin places’, where liminality and this conversation with ‘the other’ or the greater, is amplified through awe and through the quality of listening that can arise there. It is not just external listening, but the kind of listening that brings us into conversation with creative ideas, images, stories which don’t speak in the bright. It is in this place, this landscape of listening, that poetry so readily travels and so beautifully narrates. Music too, pairing notes with the silence between the notes to create the act of encounter. Similarly in poems, it is the words and the absence of words, which make the poem. What we leave out is as important as what we put in; the known and the absence of the known. The thin place is a canvas, not blank, but dark. The ink from this place comes from having made space for listening to the deepest song of us where the dark is the essential carrier of the notes, and the absence of notes. It’s the music of the middle; the music, as Seamus Heaney has described, as bird song, only ever singing close to ‘the music of what happens’.

Your creative retreat this week, is very simple. It is to sit in the dark, ideally in a place which is already familiar to you with eyes open.

Notice what it is to be in the dark for a while.

Here are some questions to contemplate as you sit, and which you may want to bring to your journal, perhaps only with candlelight, afterwards.

As you sit in the dark, how is the familiar rendered unfamiliar?

Notice how your eyes gradually adjust. Is the dark really totally dark, or can you make out outlines, shapes? What do you notice about the quality of your other senses in the dark?

What images or metaphors feel relevant to you from this experience in relationship to your own creativity?

How is the dark necessary in your own creative life?

How does it relate to ‘the music of what happens’.

You can let me know how you get on in the comments.

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A few reminders:

The Winter Solstice salon is today, 7-9pm Irish time. I’ve a very special line-up of poems selected, with prompts to help us listen inwards, and the salon will close with seasonal creative ritual. Tickets are still available here. And if you sign up for annual membership of The Wild Edge by 4pm Irish time, I’ll gift you a ticket to the salon as a little bonus.

A reminder too, that for paid subscribers, your winter solstice guide awaits. With additional writing prompts to guide us into our listening, a creative practice and a simple ritual to help cross this special seasonal threshold. You are find it over on The Wild Edge here.

Thank you all so much.

Wishing you all a beautiful Winter Solstice, filled with the magic of the dark and the wonder of the returning light.

Clare. X