"The moon was created for the counting of days." - Hebrew midrash
The new year has begun. Samhain is behind us, the Wheel starts its new revolution, and we come now to the first moon of the year.
In rare cases, when the Harvest Moon falls in October, this would be - or could be - the Hunter's Moon. In some traditions, it is also called the Frost Moon, for obvious reasons. Among some indigenous peoples, this was called the Beaver Moon - both because now the creatures were preparing for the Winter, and because this was the last chance for hunters to collect warm furs.
But there is another aspect of this moon, one I think is too important to substitute. It's a concept often overlooked, but vitally important to our idea of balance - the concept of darkness.
So this month, at the first moon of this new year, we celebrate the Dark Moon.
Read on . . .
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver
We are afraid of the dark, and not just as children - darkness has been a symbol of fear and menace, of evil and chaos, in cultures around the world, from the beginnings of civilization. To grow in spirit, in knowledge, in compassion, is to be "enlightened" - literally, to move from darkness into light. The Dark is the home of demons and monsters, like the blank spaces on the map -
"Here There Be Dragons" - and all that is evil we call the "forces of darkness".
We are helpless in the dark. Blind. The dark is always our most trying time - Our Darkest Hour. Like our ancestors, we see the setting sun, and the passage from Summer into Winter's long nights, as the transition from the familiar and safe into a fearful and undiscovered country.
"You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in." - Arlo Guthrie
But darkness is part of all that is. The Wheel of the Year is light and dark. The cycles of the rising and setting sun, the waxing and waning moon, each take us through dark to light and back again. Night and Day. Winter and Summer.
Those cycles should always be in balance, and we should always want them to be, but we crave the light. We revel in it in Summer. We light candles and bonfires to invoke it - and call it back to us - in the Winter. When the Sun leaves us each evening, we hold the Dark at bay with a flood of electricity.
But the darkness is its own thing, and it deserves respect. It should have its own time in the various cycles of the world, however much we resist it. It deserves, in its turn, to be embraced - and the first moon of the year is an especially fitting time to do just that.
"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, and it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness." - Genesis, 1:3-4
All things begin in the dark. We start as children shuttered in the womb. Our dreams and ideas bubble up from the lightless space of our subconscious. By the counting of many societies, days begin with sunset - each new day born in the night. The year begins with the passage into Winter.
The Dark is the place we all come from.
It is a blank canvas, a curtain-shrouded stage. When the falling darkness covers what we can see, we are free to imagine what is next. When the Wheel dips into Winter, the world is reset for the Spring. When the night swallows each day, it gives birth to tomorrow.
The Dark is the easel of creation.
"All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness." - John Ruskin
Darkness obscures - but it also reveals. Character, the old saying goes, is who you are in the dark. What you find in it is only what you take with you. In the dark we can know nothing - and that lets us find what we
believe.
Try this:
Sit in the dark for an hour. An entire hour, with no lamps, no candles, no glowing smartphone screen. Complete darkness. Breathe, clear your mind, and then just be.
Your mind will rush to fill the emptiness – memories, worries, idle chatter, random images. Let it all come, and then go. But after the last of that stampede has passed, what comes after it?
What does the Dark give you?
"I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars." - Og Mandino
Sleep is darkness. The death that lays between life and rebirth is darkness. The Winter that cleans the year's palate before the next Spring is darkness. The quiet mind is a kind of darkness.
And without all this darkness, there could be no light - no beginnings, no rebirths, no ideas. The world renews itself through darkness, and so do we.
“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”
― Stefan Zweig
November is a time of darkness. The nights are getting longer as we roll toward Yule. The world turns colder by the day. This is the blank and shadowed beginning of a new year.
So it is a perfect time to focus on it. It is a time to turn off the lamps, the TV, the phones, and just embrace the darkness for a bit. It is a time to reset ourselves, and remember that - much as we crave the light - the darkness, also, has things to teach.
Blessed Be.