The light of darkness
So I write, to the World. A world of too many differences to comprehend. So many, that it is an amorphous amalgam of sadness and joy, health and disease, ignorance and knowing, fair and unfair, equity and inequity, poverty and riches, opinion and fact, caring and uncaring, just and unjust.
So, I write to no-one, because I write to anyone and everyone.
As I write, I gaze at the silhouettes of the trees in the encompassing darkness of the sunset turning into evening. I see or sense the black dog, appearing and disappearing as though a wraith, in and out of ever deepening shadows. I know that my hand-writing on the paper, in the light of morning, will be indecipherable but it’s unimportant. It is, anyway, an anachronism.
I have sought to understand and to be understood. I have, outwardly, accepted the labels, whilst inwardly shrinking, dissolving, becoming the flotsam and jetsam of a tumultuous ocean that, (apparently) is known only to me and thus, of course, can’t be labelled. At least not with any real meaning.
The birds alert me to the sounds of darkness as they squabble over the best branches on which to settle, safely, for the night. They are beautiful. Whether seen or only heard or even sensed, their presence is a delight — a wonder. It exemplifies grace. No, not what the religious would attribute to one of their gods’ wonders but a simple delight of nature’s way of educating us all — we who supposedly have dominion over the animals.
The black dog brushes my knee and I pause to welcome the warmth of feeling, caring, without judgment or labels. The few words of appreciation that fall from my lips, fall on deaf ears — or do they, I find myself thinking? Does the black dog know what I feel and what I’m saying or is that notion nothing more than imaginative anthropomorphism or, worse still, metaphysical nonsense?
The pink, violet and yellow streaks of the last of the sun catch my attention and I shiver with realisation that I’m uncomfortably cold. I shut my notebook. I move to get up but, responding to the transformation of day to night and the onset of silence and darkness, not quite so black, for the city lights usurp the beauty of nature’s time-table, I sit back down and lose myself in a beauty that shouldn’t exist here. Yet it does.
The black dog is not devoid of feeling, of appreciation, of humour, of expression. The black dog is all of those, in jumbled juxtaposition and as readily comforting as threatening. Those who don’t know it, haven’t met it, see it as a threat. It isn’t. Embracing the black dog extinguishes fear, frees the mind and allows acceptance to nurture.
The black dog is your friend, not your enemy.
