If you have ever had an occasion
to be out early in the morning before the dawn breaks, you will have noticed
that the darkest time of night is immediately before dawn. The darkness deepens and becomes more anonymous. If you had never been to the world and never
known what a day was, you couldn’t possibly imagine how the darkness breaks,
how the mystery and color of a new day arrives.
Light is incredibly generous, but also gentle. When you attend to the way the dawn comes,
you learn how light can coax the dark.
The first fingers of light appear on the horizon, and ever so deftly and
gradually, they pull the mantle of darkness away from the world. Quietly before you is the mystery of a new
dawn, the new day Emerson said “No one suspects the days to be gods.” It is one of the tragedies of modern culture
that we have lost touch with these primal thresholds of nature. The urbanization of modern life has succeeded
in exiling us from this fecund kinship with our mother earth. Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in
clay form. We need to remain in rhythm
with our inner clay voice and longing.
Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss,
consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely
unintelligible.
The world rests in the
night. Trees, mountains, fields, and
faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within
the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the
ancient womb. Nighttime is
womb-time. Our souls come out to
play. The darkness absolves everything;
the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night. The dawn is a refreshing time, a time of
possibility and promise. All the
elements of nature – stones, fields, rivers and animals – are suddenly there
anew in the fresh dawn light. Just as
darkness brings rest and release, so the dawn brings awakening and
renewal. In our mediocrity and
distraction, we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous
universe. Each day the dawn unveils the
mystery of this universe. Dawn is the
ultimate surprise; it awakens us to the immense “thereness” of nature. The wonderful subtle color of the universe
arises to clothe everything. This is
captured in a phrase from William Blake: “Colors are the wounds of light.” Colors bring out the depth of secret presence
at the heart of nature.
~ John O’Donohue ~
Excerpted from “Anam Cara”
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