Gaze Upon the Darkness

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Curves.

“Gaze upon the darkness,” my lover in the meditation tells me, “to better see the stars.”

He’s not my lover, not on any physical plane. Yet, it’s the kind of thing a lover would say, perhaps with a brief explanation of the anatomy of the human eye, and there would be but one meaning.  With this man who visits in my dreams and meditations, it has so little to do with astronomy or anatomy.

He has shown me things in the Dreamtime that leave my heart full  and my tears spilling over. Deep, personal secrets. Emotions  no one else can see. Moments for me alone. Moments I will keep for me alone.

He is such a beautiful light and yet so hidden away. I want to scoop him into my arms—like a little boy with a bruised knee—and hug him to  me and smooth his tousled hair and kiss it all better.

There are so many things I wanted to tell him in this meditation,  but I was too surprised by the depth of his emotions to speak. The best I could do was some tight- throated murmur about how I’m allowing him to heal in his  own  way  and that  I’ve  never  stopped  working  the magick for him that he asked of me. But there was so much more I wanted to say.

I wanted  to tell him  that  I think  that  it’s fear  that keeps us  humans from making changes into better versions of our true selves. We spend so much time mourning the poverty of the past and holding onto what’s familiar, even when it’s miserable, that we can’t see the lushness of the future.

We humans  let ourselves  become  stuck  rather  than take the risk  because when we risk, we might fail, especially   if we have a history of failure.   Or we might win and then stupidly lose our prize, and isn’t that worse?  To become better, to have all that we desire, to transform ourselves into this wondrous new being and have none of the old us left and then….then lose our prize and be left with nothing? Or worse, to go back to what we were before?

A butterfly becoming a worm again, no beauty and no wings. All we can do is writhe and burrow or wait to be picked off by predators.

How do we take that kind of risk, the risk to go after our prize? We fear not just losing and becoming  worthless again—in the eyes of someone else, in our own eyes, in the eyes of the Gods. We fear not just our own pain, but what pain we might cause others. It’s human, I know, but fear keeps us stuck where we are rather than where we might be loved and valued. Better to live in hell than to take a chance of losing heaven.

It’s in our nature to want “forever.”  Sometimes  we think we have it and we hold on too tightly and choke it. Sometimes it was  never  the  reality  we  imagined  at all. When “forever” is offered, we don’t even reach for it be- cause, if we take it, we want it to last and so very many things  can go wrong  and cost us everything.  Why,  the only way to protect ourselves from loss is never to have the prize at all!

And here I am, so jaded about happy endings and yet such a hopeless romantic.

No. Not hopeless.  If there’s one thing I have more than anything else, it is hope. I hang onto it like Pandora with my arms crushing the box to my chest and refusing to let go.

When we are certain that the risk of gain outweighs the fear of loss, that more can be gained than would be lost if we should lose, then we step forward and claim all that is ours and regain the wholeness we  lost sometime after our births.

“Gaze upon the darkness,” my lover in the meditation tells me, “to better see the stars.”

I have seen his darkness, but what I want to tell him is that more than anything, I see the stars in his soul.