Definitions and directions

Holding on, letting go, and getting my bearings

Where, exactly, are we going

In my last journal entry, I said I wanted to learn to ‘close my eyes.’ To make it a practice. Not only because keeping my eyes open in the bright neon world of screens and tech drowns out my creative instinct, my desire for hard and holy things¹, but because the artificial light has a way of subsuming; the longer I stare, the more of me slips away.

This practice I’m proposing is an act of desperation. I’m trying to save myself from becoming more machine than human. But I need to define what it means to close my eyes, to have a clear, active direction into what Paul Simon called (and I’m paraphrasing) the friendly darkness. The practice of closing my eyes will act as the map on this adventure, but even the best map is useless if I can’t read the markings.

In every direction

I woke up before sunrise on the day I began writing this entry to sit down and draw out the definition on my whiteboard. 

But I couldn’t see it. I felt the meaning, but no matter what I wrote, nothing was coming into focus. I was squinting at the words, but they wouldn’t sharpen. I knew they were there, so I tried seeing them through scratched, murky lenses, axes to grind, opinions, and marketing. That is to say, I searched the internet and read a few articles. Looking back, I realize that was the wrong place for seeking clarity. 

Twenty minutes after I was supposed to have stopped theorizing for the day, I was forced out of my desk chair by schedule and a growling stomach. 

My husband had made it downstairs and we sat, sipping steaming drinks, in our chairs by the fireplace as we do every morning before work. It’s instinctual for me to run my creative problems by my husband. He always helps to clear the cobwebs. 

I could tell after the tea and talk that something was rolling around inside my head, moving, becoming flexible and alive, but still not taking flight.

So, I let it go. 

I was already queasy from too much early-morning blue light (I can’t be the only one who experiences this), and I couldn’t bear to focus on the definition anymore. Not even in the company of my charming husband.

I slumped into the quotidian—feeding our animals, tidying up, relieved not to be thinking about the question, and letting myself be human for a while.

And that, of course, is when the answer came 

I’m not good at opening the cage door and letting ideas out of my head. I can’t control them. I can’t lay claim to them in the same hard-earned way. They spread their own wings and light where they will. 

I wanted to keep my eyes wide open as I searched for the answer, filtering through all the noise, light, color, and debate of the internet, the experts, the authorities. I wanted this discovery to be my moment, my brilliance. But too much of that sort of light blinds.

When I say I need to close my eyes, what I mean is: I need to create a quiet place in myself so I can hear God.

That’s it. Nothing fancy and no long words. I ran it by my husband, and he liked it, too.

There are times, like that morning, when I have to close my eyes or go mad, when the ache in my head becomes a blaring dinner bell and a hammer that wants to knock me out all at the same time. It’s exhausting, trying to fight my human body and run like a machine. And it always leaves a mark—small, but deep.

Instruments and information

In ancient times, Viking explorers used navigational crystals called sunstones to find the sun’s position in uniformly-gray skies. The crystals would polarize the light, filtering out all but the brightest spot.

Leiv Eirikson discovering America, Christian Krohg, 1893

To learn to step away long before the ache, to close my eyes as a practice, to recognize and attend to the need for silence and true self-love: these will combine to be my sunstone. A way of filtering out the distractions that make it impossible to plot my true course. As it is, I’ve spent far too much time going in circles.

So, I’ve chosen a destination, deciphered my map and landed a valuable item. If I were a character in a fairy tale, fantasy video game, or tabletop RPG this would be the point at which I’d be given leave to set out on my journey. But I have one more stop to make in town.

The friendly darkness awaits, and I want to understand what little I can of that treacherous, beautiful realm before I set off to walk her earth.

1. A phrase attributed to the author Ann Voskamp, but I’m unsure of where it appears.