fall from light
Today was a gorgeous Seattle fall day. After a somewhat lackluster summer and a rainy transition into the rainy season, it was pleasure to walk my dog in the neighborhood, smelling the crisp autumnal leaves. Rejoicing in the feeling of sunlight on my face.
There are gray days here when I wish it could be sunny all the time. Re, the father of life, always radiating upon us with energy and the energy to rise. But my body is not designed to always be in the light. The sun has another facet, the energy of Sekhmet, the harsh destructive energy that enervates and dehydrates the body, or causes malignant genes to bloom into cancerous lesions. I've spoken to people from perennially sunny climates who say they find it as depressing as it can feel to be in the gray Pacific Northwest.
My cultural resonances from Catholicism has been to associate the light with good and darkness with evil. Yet I reflect upon the protective shading of trees and the roof over my head that allow me reprieve from heat and light. I find rest and comfort in the darkness, even as I experience fear of the dark. People who have lived in Seattle for a long time seem to make the most of the summer, but turn with relief to the time of the year when things cool off. Even I have found a kind of relief and excitement in the opportunity to slow down and turn inward.
The play of light and dark moves through my experience of life. I find that an artist I admired has said things I find appalling. At times I have connected deeply to her music and her artistic vision, and then there are moments when I feel she is flippant towards something I find truly scary. I grew up in a place where virulent white supremacy and a history of Klan activity was part of our history and continues to this day. Growing up, I and many knew of at least one town in which people of color were advised never to stop for fear of their safety, with good reason. That someone could be insensitive to this kind of darkness seems to me an unfortunate flaw, and yet I know that I myself have flaws, blind spots, and ignorance that would rightly affront others. I'm not free of racism. I strive to be mindful of it. The more I can own it, the easier it is for me to avoid acting upon it, to address it when I see it.
Sparkymonster says:
You can say and do racist things and be a "nice person". Niceness is not a get out of racism free card. That not how it works.
It happens all the time, all over the world. People and institutions we admire say or do something really fucked up, beyond all reckoning, and it becomes almost impossible to reconcile the affront of the action with the reputation of the actor. So we get people in the Catholic Church covering up child molestation, or riots in Pennsylvania protecting the reputation of a man who was widely celebrated but colluded in protecting a child abuser.
Every citizen of Omelas, when they come of age, is told about that one blameless child being put through hell. And they have a choice: Accept that is the price for their perfect lives in Omelas, or walk away from that paradise, into uncertainty and possibly chaos.
A world of light is a world denying, suppressing, and feeding a terrible darkness. When a person appears to me a glowing hero, a savior, to be in some way perfect, then I am denying their essential humanity, and contributing to a terrible burden, just as I am when I look at someone as inherently broken, bad, worthless, or inhuman. Clinging to one and rejecting the other creates an imbalance, and nature does not tolerate imbalance for long. The greater the imbalance, the greater will be the corrective action that attempts to restore balance. Protecting a pristine reputation means that the explosion will be all the greater and more devastating.