We Can’t Prepare for This Moment

‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

Detail from the cover of Opening to Darkness on Bookshop

Earlier this year, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel released Opening to Darkness: Eight Gateways for Being with the Absence of Light in Unsettling Times. She writes about “being with darkness” and “with dark experiences” as well as with the more abstract idea of darkness, so that we are “tuning into darkness as a known and unknown experience of life.” It’s encouragement for those “who remember living in dark times as a place of power and clear seeing.”

This approach is not for those who prefer positivity and “cheery dispositions,” understood as lightness needing protection from darkness.

Manuel, who also identifies herself as cis and female, has a “blood lineage [that] goes back to Haiti by way of Louisiana,” and she has experienced and learned from ceremonies from other nations. “We have unique insights,” she says, “into the realm of darkness: unbearable, powerful, universal, ancestral, and cosmic.”

Some people cyclically give birth in darkness and leave and return to that place. Others stay put in a dark, chaotic home so they can learn “what it is that we need to know at this time” with “no real coming and going, no departure and return,” and they serve as spiritual messengers to others. Manuel lends some ritual interpretation to the darkness in the hopes of lessening the trauma.

What Darkness Is

We have an “experience of what we call darkness that is so palpable we run from it, hide in it, and often seek ways to annihilate it,” she says. But that’s not “the true darkness.”

True darkness is unknowable and ungettable. We encounter it on our way to get other things. (Those other things may not be what we need.) Darkness has “potential to disrupt and to renew.” It’s telling us something about ourselves and what we need to do. Our ego may dissolve and change. This place may protect us and need us to protect it, letting more darkness in. It’s not a crushing weight but a door. It may “show us its gold without [us] mining for it.” It may respond to what we most truly seek. And it may seek to get something from us.

Darkness isn’t “opposition to the light.” It’s dynamic, and it already contains the notion of light, as all…