On this Earth, surrounded by polarities such as day and night, summer and winter, male and female, another pair of opposites that can't live without one another is: linear and cyclical.
We are raised in a linear world.
We count minutes and hours, days, weeks and months, we number years and millennia, all in the name of advancing, in a straight line, towards the next higher number (2008 is the current achievement).
Where are we going on our linear journey? And is it, indeed, linear? In pre-school, my daughter learned to sing: "Round and round the Earth is turning/ turning always round to morning/ and from morning round to night…" thus, she learned a lesson in cyclicity (a word that my computer's spell-check doesn't recognize…) Cyclicity: the opposite of linearity.
Earth doesn't count her cycles, nor does the moon or the seasons count theirs.
They are not moving forward toward a finite achievement, but return, time and again, in a never-ending dance, which repeats itself, yet is eternally different. No autumn is like another, however it comes back, predictably, at the end of each summer, just as spring follows every winter. We don't number the seasons, nor the moon cycles, yet we count our calendar and age years, as if advancing toward an end. Why?
Years are solar cycles, and we count that which we can see and measure.
365 days are a measurable quantity, defined by the journey of Earth around the sun. We, in the west, live by light. Solar as well as artificial lights illuminate our waking hours. We are rather apprehensive of the dark… That which we can't see is unknown, unpredictable, and therefore scary. However, living by light only, we may be missing half of the picture! We may overlook the richness that the dark has to offer, the surprises that the unknown may hold.
Dreams, seeds, and insights -- all grow in the dark… In as much as a fetus cannot develop in light, so can't our intuition or vision. Like a seed that needs the dark womb of Earth in order to sprout, so does our insights come from our depth.
Embracing the dark is embracing the fertile part of our psyche.
Letting go of our fears of the dark is a journey, since most of us do not admit we indeed are afraid of it. "I may have been afraid of the dark as a child" we may say, "but not anymore!" Well, then, how many of us don't switch on the light when we wake up and go to the bathroom at night? You may not call this fear, yet it is the discomfort we feel in the dark that urges us to eliminate it by switching on the lights.
Going to the bathroom in the dark is a good exercise in cultivating intuition.
Starting to get comfortable with the unknown will grow our ability to see in the dark, both physically and metaphorically. Listening, smelling and tasting, rather than always relying on using our eyes, will yield a richness of sensory input which, as it becomes familiar, will give us information from the world around us that we never before were open to receive…
When we stop depending on our eyes, we stop depending on light to clarify everything.
Starting to keep a dream journal is another good way to become attuned with information that lives in the depth, rather than the surface light. The best way to keep a dream journal is to have it at your bedside, within an arm's reach.
The trick is to write in it upon waking up, with your eyes still closed! The longer we keep our eyes closed, the longer we can stay in that land of reverie, between sleep and wakefulness, between dark and light. Don't worry about your hand-writing or the straightness of your lines.
This is an exercise in retaining the deliciousness of the world beyond our ordinary senses, in drawing insight from deep within, not in neatness of writing. Let your lines be crooked and your words warped… we are moving away from linearity in order to explore the other side. And here we come full circle: the other side of linearity is cyclicity; the other side of light - darkness.
The cyclical nature of life is hidden in the dark: unnoticed, unknown, un-praised…
As we work on cultivating intuition and dreams, which reside in the dark, let's also shift our focus from counting (years, ages, grades) to embracing the recurring nature of life, it's cycles. The seasons return and bring with them familiar scents, temperatures, sounds, and tastes.
Focusing on these, rather than linearly counting years, will open the door to different kinds of information from our senses. Moving the focus from advancing by counting, to experiencing by sensing, will reveal that which the eye in full light does not see. It may take away the anxiety of "what might this year bring" to the comfort of looking forward to its seasons and their familiarity.
Instead of 'New Year Resolutions' that are often forgotten after the first impetus runs its course, we can start exploring who we are in each of the seasons. What parts of us come out in summer? What strengths do we have in winter? Planning our year as a recurring cycle, based on studying ourselves in each season, will yield the comfort of old friends coming to visit, rather than the unknown that stems from a linear view of time, where every new year is an anonymous visitor.
In the same vain we can start planning our monthly recurring cycles, but we'll keep this for the next article…