Night Season

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die." Ecclesiastes 3

A reader recently asked whether I could “get back to the heart of what I originally started this substack around.”

The answer is that no, I can’t.

I don’t think I would, even if I could.

But I can’t.

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Things move in cycles.

Your life moves in cycles, as does the civilization you’re born into.

The economy moves in cycles, as does the market. In Hindu mythology, even the cosmos follows one.

These cycles are fractal: from the seasons of the year to the rhythm of the day, all the way down to the rhythm of your breath which shapes this moment — cycles nested within cycles.

You can try to align yourself with these cycles, try to flow with them or strain against them.

I used to strain.

Look where it got me.

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Great investors pay close attention to the cycle. They may not be able to predict its timing, but know the next stage is coming. They understand that leaning against the force of time is a dangerous game.

But I’m not an investor.

I write.

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I don’t make choices or decisions. I don’t weigh possibilities. Instead, I observe patterns and move with them. I wait for unfolding. I sense currents and I flow with them. You don’t have to be enlightened to operate this way; you just have to release the tiller. — Jed McKenna

I try not to strain against the seasons of my life. I try to flow with it. This may sound simple but it’s not.

I live with less tension and less grasping, which is nice. But it requires a degree of acceptance that can be deeply discomforting.

After all, I don’t get to choose what season it is. I just try to sit with what is.

What is that season of my life? Call it an early midlife crisis. 37 years old, divorced, no children, in the middle of a career transition from finance to media. Actually, strike that. That’s just jargon to talk around the painful truth.

I spent a decade trying to be someone I wasn’t. I stuck with a career that didn’t suit me because I could not dare look at the truth. I was wearing my mask so tightly, I forgot who I was. My pain was constant and sharp, to paraphrase Bret Easton Ellis. Not that I allowed myself to feel that. No, after work I was busy trying to escape and numb the pain (a topic for another day).

Anyway, since falling out of my old life in 2020, I’ve been writing online. This suits me a lot better, but I have no idea where it will take me. And by the very nature of creative work, I find myself even more closely tied to the rhythms of my life.

The best description I’ve found for this season of transition, in particular for the time since the spring of last year, is the dark night of the soul.

midjourney’s sketch of a man walking into an underworld dreamscape

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You don’t choose a dark night for yourself. It is given to you. Your job is to get close to it and sift it for its gold. — Thomas Moore

That may sound pretty dark, but it’s important not to confuse it with depression. It can be depression (or rather: clinical depression can be a dark night of the soul), but as Thomas Moore explains in his book Dark Nights of the Soul, a dark night is really any ordeal that challenges you at a deeper level.

Depression is a label and a syndrome, while a dark night is a meaningful event. Depression is a psychological sickness, a dark night is a spiritual trial. — Thomas Moore

Dark nights are “a natural part of life” and can come in many forms: sickness, divorce, job loss, loss of loved ones, betrayal, and painful failure in areas like business, money, creative endeavors, and relationships.

Moore, a psychotherapist and former monk, believes the dark night’s “spiritual trial” calls for a “spiritual response”, not merely a therapeutic one.

He believes we spend much of our time avoiding life. The dark night, which strips life down to the essentials, forces us to pay attention. It forces us to wrestle with aspects of ourselves we’ve been avoiding.

To Moore, these encounters with darkness are periods of transformation, they are a “stage in alchemy.” The dark night offers a “way to return to living” as more of who we are. It is an opportunity for rebirth into a life lived more fully and more deeply engaged.

Moore believes the dark night is that rare time when your soul is being forged — if you let it.

But who has time for that?

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Sadly, we have been conditioned to do the exact opposite. We have been taught to avoid the darkness.

Life hits us with a crisis and we strain to return to being happy, healthy, and productive as fast as we can. We want to turn on the light and get on with our lives as quickly as possible.

The dark night appears and we try to escape it.

We want to be healed now.

We want the problem fixed asap.

We prefer to buy a band-aid and chew a painkiller than to investigate our depths.

We have no interest in sitting with the darkness.

We have no appetite for that kind of discomfort.

And we don’t have time to lose.

But in our rushing back to the light, we miss out on the night’s gifts.

We miss out on its wisdom, its strange beauty, its deeper meaning.

We miss a chance to meet the teachers living in its caverns.

We are not out to solve the dark night, but to be enriched by it. — Thomas Moore

Cave paintings in Lascaux, France.

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By definition, the dark night is dark. You operate with very little visibility. A friend told me you get “just enough light for the step you’re on.”

So you move around slowly, using all of your senses. You try to develop a feel for the darkness. You perceive more texture and nuance. You try to act more like a child would: with curiosity, soaking up every sensation like a sponge.

The dark night is a time of subtle movement. It is a time to move forward in circles, a time of stumbling, of bumping into things.

You learn not to cry when you hit your head. You accept the pain for a moment, then you return to your exploration.

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The dark night carries the scent of deep mystery. It can be a moment of peeking behind the veil of life. Things get pretty weird if you do that. I like life better this way, but it hasn’t been an easy process. It’s not exactly fun or glamorous. It’s not rewarding in any conventional sense. You get to experience aspects of the mystery and you understand that you will never understand.

It’s like the kaleidoscope gets turned a few times and each iteration reveals a strange layer of reality. Then you sit with the paradox of your insignificance and your capacity to rise to heights you could not have imagined. You’re the drop, the ocean, and the person buying a coffee and listening to the birds in the park, all at the same time.

It can be disorienting. Your sleep may suffer. Dreams take on a new quality. They turn into freight trains loaded with symbols barreling toward the horizon. In flickers of lightning, you see an outline of a future straining to take shape.

Suddenly, the world feels very, very alive. It starts whispering in subtle ways: in the song of birds, the rush of the wind, the trickle of water, the phrases carried to you by strangers. The world, of course, has always been alive. It’s just that maybe you were not.

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Another thing that can happen in the dark night is that you find the shine of your soul.

Your soul has, of course, always been there. But it can easily get covered by layers of dust and clutter. It can take work to find it. Underneath thick slabs of identity, you find fragments of your truth. You excavate it, carefully, like brushing sand off an ancient mosaic.

When that happens, you set a process in motion. There’s no turning back. I think that’s why people go to great lengths to avoid the whole thing.

Because once you start pulling on the thread of your soul, the whole sweater of your reality can unravel. Then you stand there, naked, holding no truths, facing the sacred.

One analogy is Ridley Scott’s Prometheus. In the opening scene, one of the ‘engineer’ aliens stays behind on Earth and ingests the black goo, a mutagen that disintegrates his body. The engineer’s remains drop into the river. By sacrificing himself, he seeded life on Earth.

I have no idea what waits in the essence of your dark night.

But I know that some things cannot be touched without being transformed by them.

an evocative scene worth watching

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This substack, as my reader pointed out, “is losing the original interpretations and work.” In that original work, my reader felt, I “really brought great insights to the topic.” Thank you for the compliment. I take it.

But they are right.

Yes, this is absolutely happening.

It’s happening because I touched essence. Silly me.

I don’t think I could stop the process, even if I wanted to.

But of course, I don’t want to.

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Moore argues that the dark night doesn’t require doing as much as it requires not-doing. It demands that we feel, observe, and let move what needs to move. It demands that we give our inner processes space to work on us.

You try to sit patiently with what is happening.

You try to accept the process.

You find faith that this will lead you where you need to go.

You try to get comfortable with what — with who — is emerging.

Occasionally, your past crashes over you in big waves. You sit with who you have been, with all the moments of your life tied together like the neurons of a giant spectral brain. Everything is connected. One moment leads to the next. It all makes complete sense and also looks utterly absurd. Like, how could that have been the life you chose to live?

This process requires that you pick up a torch and follow our shadow guides into your inner underworld.

If you’re like me, you find your caverns painted with strange symbols and filled with the energy of abandoned emotions, bottled up in jars like black goo. You parse the shelves and look at your grief, your pain, your shame, your rage, your fear, your envy, your betrayal. You’re stunned to discover your darkness stored up and neatly arranged.

Maybe you even find a chamber full of emotional alien eggs. Get too close and one will jump you like a facehugger and take you back to a particular traumatic memory.

best tread carefully around here

You don’t want to spend your life in those caverns, but they are part of your process of alchemy.

This is where you sit quietly and dance madly, where you laugh and cry, where you cleanse, release, purge, and burn what needs to be burned. This is where you may have to accept that some things will remain unsolved and unhealed, either in this dark night or in this lifetime.

In any event, that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve been sitting, as patiently as I could, with the darkness.

And I’ve been taking notes.

I hope to emerge more alive, more like my true self, and relating more deeply to the world. And I hope to return with a few things worth sharing.

Because that’s why I am here. Alive and on this planet, I mean.

I’m here to expose myself, immerse myself, and feel as deeply as I can bear.

I’m here to observe, listen, and participate fully in the strange unfolding of life.

I’m here to look for patterns, meaning, and beauty.

I’m here to alchemize what I encounter.

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That’s why my mind went on strike any time I made plans to turn this into a successful business — like, you know, my own tiny financial media empire.

That’s when I had to put my drafts away by the dozen.

I put them on ice because they were no longer alive.

Because I’m not running a business.

I’m making art.

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I’m trying to, anyway. And it’s imperfect, for sure. It still feels like making Play-Doh figures. You make a thing until you can make the thing you want to make.

And yet, that’s what I’m here for. To express what I see with my heart. Life’s too damn short to do it any other way.

It’s not art if it doesn’t carry the glow of my soul. And I don’t get to choose how that soul glows.

I just surrender to the experience. I endure the facehuggery and try to put it into words later. There is nothing else to do. What my conscious mind can come up with pales in comparison to witnessing things unfold.

So, I surrender to the work.

I no longer do it for the readers.

I don’t even do it for myself.

I say what needs to be said because I understand that it must be said.

Some things need to happen to move the wheel of time along.

Some words must be spoken for the world to carry on.

You say what needs to be said, not to be remembered, but to be forgotten.

All of it matters in the same way that it does not.

So, no. I am not going back. I am moving forward. In circles.

I don’t know where that will lead and, honestly, I wouldn’t tell you if I did.

Because what would be the point of spoiling the story?

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If all of this sounds like nonsense to you, you’re right.

If you’re convinced you’re staring at the ramblings of a madman, you’re right.

If this journey is not for you, I understand. Remember: there is a season to everything in life.

I can’t change it and I don’t have time to worry about it either.

I have to move forward with just enough light for the step I’m on.

If you’re interested in the strange journey of life, you’re welcome to pick up a torch and join. You could even share it with friends. That’d be cool, too.

Frederik

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us. — Joseph Campbell