Enter the Sharing Circle to share your thoughts about Darkness and Night in our tradition and in your own life.
Are you a night owl? Do you keep a lot of lights on to avoid the dark, or seek it out?
What’s your experience with dark skies? Have you ever seen the Milky Way?
On a spiritual level, have you grown from periods of darkness in your life? How do you enter and integrate the darkness of your soul experiences, while allowing for the light to return?
Consider and comment on these questions of any of the themes in this Gateway of Darkness.
Featured Image: Havdalah campfire in Mill Creek, California, JHD
Return to the Gateway of Darkness, or choose another Gateway.
During the first day of creation darkness was just there…it was not created. I think of darkness as the canvas upon which creation takes place. It is the prerequisite to creation, and in our lives is the prerequisite to creativity. Sometimes it is out of the darkness of sadness that the greatest joy arises. Out of the darkness of ignorance and errors, rectification and healing can take place. Rather than shunning the darkness I try to be thankful for the contrast that darkness offers me. It is the darkness of the night that permits us to see the stars so far away. The rabbis of the Talmud point out that it is the dark center of the eye that even permits us to see.
Beautiful, and even knowing all those things it is sometimes hard for us to be thankful in those cirumstances. What do you think it takes to develop that consciousness?
Also I love that last saying from the Talmud, do you have the source?