We Can’t Prepare for This Moment
‘Opening to Darkness’ by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
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…
