Why are we afraid of the dark?
In the first year of ecotherapy training, we held a night vigil, sitting alone in in the woods from dusk until daybreak, attempting to stay to awake to be with the dark.
As the darkness crept in, the unexpected emotion I sat with was sadness. Sadness that had many sources but one I think was a sense of loss, for a time when I would have felt comfortable with the situation, where darkness would have been a much more familiar place than it is now. Sadness at our loss of connection and attunement to the night and the woods. A sadness that we’ve chased away the dark.
Religious symbolism aside, we resist the dark because it no longer fits how we want to exist. In the dark we have to move slowly and with care, if we move at all. Our normal rush and indifference to our surroundings become impossible, we have to slow down, to notice, to feel our way. The dark demands slowness. It invites stillness.
The dark reminds us how much we rely on the visual. When that’s taken away the our other senses prickle back to life, the smell of the wood floor gets thicker and soupier, and the noise! The movement of our tiny friends, the falling frass, the soundscape of rotting – it’s all clear in the dark. If “sensory perception is the silken web that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem”*, we need all our senses to feel into connection. Maybe we live in disconnection because we rely only on our eyes.
In the shadows it’s hard to it’s much harder to tell things apart. A falling branch, a moving animal, could be anything in our imagination. The dark allows the ‘inanimate’ to come alive. Our certainty around that which is alive and not alive dwindles, maybe leaving the that question lingering as the returns.
It was a long night, but somewhere in the night the chasm of the dark and the brightness of the stars brought about a feeling of dissolving. In the densest of the dark, your edges disappear. Your form melds with the other forms. We can’t maintain the illusion of separation in the dark.
