I am a forest, and a night of dark trees; but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

–Friedrich Nietzsche

I have always responded to the call of darkness.  The lure.  The fact that so many others are frightened of it pushes me deeper into the woods, into the caves of humanity to witness and share in the deeper parts of the psyche. But not just to witness, to stand guard, to lend strength, to share and participate and give the wounds salve until they heal.  It’s not the draw of the macabre.  It is the draw of desire and spirit.  Pure and hallowed to delve deeper than the normal person would.

I serve the darker edges of humanity but specifically the wounds we carry.  Wounds…be they physical, psychic or emotional tend to cause us the greatest amount of fear in our lives.  And we guard our deepest, darkest fears more than anything in the world.  Sure, you think about people who seem to wear their woundedness on their sleeve…almost boasting that they’ve suffered through life and are here to prove to humanity their strength.  But what I’ve found is that they don’t put the greatest wounds on display…only the ones that they can wear without harm, without exposing the deeper ones that lay underneath.  Those….those they guard fiercely and fight anyone who tries to disturb them.

The only superpower I really have is I am the person people trust with the greatest of their wounds.  Their sorrows, their intense pain, their embarrassments, their sense of not-good-enough…these fears of divine dis-love that they try to keep secret from the rest of the world.  They tell no one.  Not their spouses.  Not their lovers.  Not their parents.  But they tell me.

They tell me or rather….they show me.  They creep slowly through the recesses of their psyche, the part they are barely aware of normally.  The instinctual and immediate part of themselves that they can’t access unless someone trespasses against that territory.  They invite me in.  Grasping my hand for strength,clutching at the light that I bring with me for fear.  Fear of the monsters laying in wait to overcome them and take control.  Maybe if I’m there the monsters won’t attack.  Won’t hurt them.  Won’t try to take over their world.

And even now as I write this, I’m flooded with the memories of when this has happened.  When I’ve seen all of someone, even the big, bad monster they thought they were holding at bay.  The anger, the greed, the resentment, the frustration, the hurt, the deception…I’ve seen so much of it.  And it is beautiful.  It is beautiful because each person’s big, bad monster is an accumulation of humanity.  It is a creation of our selves…and it is a part of ourselves.  It is the part of ourselves that we’ve discarded, hoping that it will never return.  Hoping that it will never find a way back into the light.

And I am overwhelmed with emotion because these people I have encountered have trusted me with it.  With something so precious, so grotesque and fearsome…something that resembles them far more than they want to know.

Because at the end of that journey, I show them.  I bring a light to the mirror and stand them next to their monster figure and show them…this is you….and I love you both.  I love the monster and who you’ve tried to become in order to hide it.  I love you both.

It is almost too much for them to bear.  To feel that something so ugly within themselves can be loved and cherished.  “Aren’t you afraid?” they inevitably ask me.  How can I possibly be afraid?  I can’t pretend to love someone without loving the fullness of who they are.  And by embracing the beast I can now finally love the full person.  Does the beast lash out?  Yes.  But only because it has been relegated to the darkness for so long it can no longer recognize how it feels to have light surround it and hold it safe.

But more than anything, I embrace the fullness of someone.  Their light and dark…and I show that it is possible to melt the divide between light and dark within our own lives.  That by embracing your own darkness and treating it with kindness and love that we heal the fears that placed it in the darkness to begin with…and that itself is love.  True, abiding love for our own self.

This kind of healing isn’t a wound to be worn on the shoulder as evidence of your own bravery, to prove that you’ve suffered…it is one that glows from within and is embodied in your full presence and countenance.  It is not a braggart’s courage,but a wounded soul who is now radiant with the joy of life.  Nothing more needs to be said.  No words are needed.

In an instant  I can tell the difference between those who have walked through their darkness and embraced what they have found….and those who are still hiding it, protecting it and projecting the lesser wounds as their evidence of their “confidence”.  I can tell…and the more one brags about their wounds, their victimization, their suffering, the more those words are just really big, giant “Keep OUT!” signs to loved ones and others that they will do everything in their power to keep their secret monsters safe and in the dark. They don’t trust themselves, they don’t trust their partners and they surely will never trust a professional to lead them to true healing.  I don’t bother with them.  They will continue to live a false life soaked in duality, an alchemy that falls flat and leaves them sour and needy.

No…I praise those who have done “the heavy lifting” and I await them at their next crossroads…when a new dark corner threatens to swallow them whole. I stand alone and wait for them to see me and invite me in when either everyone else has abandoned them or are too shallow to see the transformation, the little death, that must occur for them to heal and move forward.

And I am rewarded…like in the quote above…with roses and riches.  Such beauty and such abundance of soul.  I alone have been entrusted with their stories for I saw their darkness and did not run away or avoid it…I stood by them and loved them to the very end.

So….much….beauty