The friendly darkness

There's no knowing where you'll be swept off to

If the practice of Closing My Eyes, of creating a quiet place in myself where I can hear God, is the map and compass on my writer’s journey, then the Friendly Darkness is the realm to be explored. It’s not the dark of chaos where order breaks down and people disappear. It’s the place of becoming, just before the dawn, where all is potential and pregnant. It’s Narnia waiting to be born.

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away . . .. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. . .. Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing . . .. The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose.”¹

Illustration by Pauline Baynes for The Magician’s Nephew

Familiar country

Creatives exist—whether we mean to or not—both as living passages and prisms, refracting through our own angles every poem, book, wood carving or quilt that we produce, transforming chaos into order, and acting as doorways between the realms of Becoming and Being. This between-place is the Friendly Darkness. 

In that country, molded by the artist’s hand, nothing becomes something. Something with our bends, our cracks and crooks, our questions and ideas of right and wrong. An object of wish and of will, containing the power to harmonize with the music of the spheres. To amplify beauty, truth, and goodness.

This definition was the easy one. I’ve known it instinctually for a long time, and it was spoken for me by philosophers, theologians, and other artists; any good idea I have is the voice of better minds than mine filtered through experience.

But it’s difficult for me to exist in the Friendly Darkness. Even now, typing this sentence, I’m unsure of what I’ll write next. It’s uncomfortable. I’m cracking my knuckles, stretching, checking my phone, creating noise to fill the lack of clack. Because, in the moment, it’s hard to believe that anything will come next.

Being an explorer of the Friendly Darkness doesn’t guarantee particulars, but I’ve never journeyed there and come up with nothing. At the end of the day, I never climb into bed empty-handed. So, I try to trust that. 

When I write, I bring whatever raw materials I can carry—experience, education, good books, beautiful music, poetry, paintings, dreams, films, legends, philosophy, myths—and give them to God in whatever broken way I can manage. He always does something with them. As much as I allow. 

The road ahead is steep

I’ve felt, for the past year, like the blind beggar in John 9, stuck at the moment between Christ putting mud in my eyes and being told to rinse them in the pool of Siloam. I’m sitting, not able to fathom the washing that will come, increasingly unable to leave the present, because nothing else exists. That place is also the Friendly Darkness. 

Friendly. Not nice, or agreeable, or comfortable, but an old friend, as Paul Simon called it. One who is tried and found true. One who sees you as you are, where you are, and reflects that back to you with love, willing your good and a clear view of things above all else. 

The past year has filled me with liminal, muddy places. Something is there, ready to be born, just over the hill, almost within sight, and I have to follow my feet, to see what it all comes to. There’s a fear that nothing will come of the adventure, that the road will end, that the mud will never be washed from my eyes, that everything is meaningless, and I’ll end in a worse place than I started. 

But none of the true stories end that way. You know which ones I mean.

I trust them. The most trustworthy stories are the hard ones. If they were easy they’d be slogans, propaganda, marketing, or a pamphlet for the local cult disguised as a story. Nothing that lasts. 

Onward

I’ve spent my first three entries laying out definitions, directions, and destinations. From here, I leave the inn and go a’wandring. I tell my stories. I don’t feel ready at all. Between us, I’m a little scared. Typical for a chronic over-packer such as myself, but I begin to see that such preparations can be used to maintain the illusion of control, and I was never in charge of this adventure. I’m just here to set it all down.

1. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, published in 1955.