When the dark hour is the greatest
We do not get to live a wonderful life without going through the crucible experience more than once.
When we are in the depths of pain, confusion, loss and despair, all that is not us is invited to be melted away. What matters? What is real? Who said? Why?
At this moment, and in the many more of these moments that make a life, when the dark hour is the greatest, we can choose.
Do we emerge lighter, or do we invite in more darkness and live the rest of our days carrying bitterness, revenge and hate? Do we open to love and beauty, or do we close to hardness and ugliness?
Most of the great movies and books tell some version of this story.
Rather than reduce the story to the monomyth of the hero’s journey, with the discreet stages along the way, I see it as something else.
It is chaos, cyclical, emergent. There is no one path. Yet there is a thread present from the very beginning. That thread, so hard to find in our youth, becomes stronger and more obvious as we choose the path of our light.
This thread, the strange attractor, is a force of our nature. It operates on Kairos time. It refuses to conform to a linear, predictable path. It can only be known in hindsight.
It is not the hero that emerges. It is us remembering who we are and have always been, and once reclaimed, refuses to submit to anything lesser.
Photo Taken May 4th 2023
