Prompt #1: Fertile Dark

10/31/2022

During planting, a farmer drops seeds into a trench or holes wisely prepared, or presses them gently with a fingertip into well-tilled, spongey soil. If that were the end of things, the seeds would dry out in the sun or be washed away by a vigorous rain. But our farmer understands an essential natural truth: whatever happens in the dark under the right circumstances transforms life. So, dirt takes its place on top of and around seeds as well as under them.

Think of the average caterpillar, spines like dandelion fluff. By some mystery, it clothes itself in the potent dark of a chrysalis - to all appearances lifeless, its future fruitfulness an impossibility. Yet, butterflies and moths are born. Sprouts show their unlikely strength pressing up, up, from underground. Amazingly, a chick delivers itself from the dark womb of the egg, and a baby sea turtle rises, struggling with its tiny might out of the sand.

The impulse to grow through the dark towards the light is in us, too. And, while the dark can sometimes be so threatening it thwarts life and health, we must ask ourselves again and again if we can trust new realities to be born in us. Is ours a fertile dark?

Invitation to WRITE:

How are you experiencing the impulse to grow out of Covid's shadow, its oppressive confinements? What does it feel like? Are you on fire, or is there a dome over your head?
What do you expect growth to feel like? Does it require being eager, proactive, fiercely determined to grasp the gold ring of understanding? Or can growth happen simply by being willing, attentive, and receptive to insights as they come along?
What qualities in yourself ready you for the mystery of becoming new? Does your feeling about darkness change when there's evidence it can free you?

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8 Comments

Melissa Michael link

11/3/2022 07:09:36 am

I feel warm, comfortable, stable, and free to simply be while in the fertile dark. Ideas spin in time with realizations, creating an organic yin/yang between dreams and reality. Have I lain in the fertilizer long enough? Is it time to stretch upward for the sunlight and air?Like banked coals in the dark of night or smothered in a traveling cauldron my creativity has been banked and smothered and shelved while I dealt with the dark dreary depressing reality of the world gone mad. Now that reality is settling into a new normal and the oppressive dome appears to be opening I feel like I can set my coals to light on kindling, then twigs, then some real logs; like I can once again reach for my wild impossible dreams.

Karen Jessee

11/5/2022 12:24:57 pm

When I think of fertile dark, I remember my friend Brian Pierce, a preacher. The primordial dark amazed him, how it collaborated with light to give birth to everything in the universe! Mary's womb was like that--a cosmic darkness of pure creative potential. Jesus seemed to befriend darkness. They even say a total eclipse of the sun made everything dark when he died.... What happens next no one will ever know. But the dark of the Tomb is my kind of mystery: dark gives birth to light, transforming pain into something meaningful and generous.

*****
The dark is a mirror. The dark is spacious, welcoming. I can see it behind my eyes, then feel myself suffused with dark like a sponge soaked through.

In the dark, I am known. I know myself and feel love. This is the reason I stay up at night: I'm more honest when no one else is awake.

Matty Blatt

11/7/2022 09:35:58 am

The pandemic has always been an annoyance to me, something I find incredibly inconvenient and dumped on me like a pile of dirt that can't just be swept away. While we're using dirt as a metaphor for the darkness that like a cocoon harbors us for us to grow, this dirt is not fertile. It's more like heavy dust. It's not right to me to change my attitude towards it- I have to learn to live with the dust and find some real healthy dirt to grow from. Not all dirt is good, despite what everyone says. I'd rather go find some good dirt.

11/10/2022 08:30:56 am

Wow, Matty, do your words ring true! Not all dirt is good, not all dark is fertile. I would add that pain can't and shouldn't be reimagined as something good by looking for "the gift in it." Oy! Pain has a kind of power in it, and the "everything happens for a reason" magic trick denies the truth of pain. For me, the truth is that transformation, creative growth--the kind of growth that makes me someone who wasn't there before--is possible even when I'm choking on dust and can't see a thing.

Your writing makes me wonder: Where is the good dirt? I can imagine the feeling of sinking into its cool, moist-like-a-lava-cake hug.How will that hug help me come out of this bone-dry hard time, rehydrated and ready to go? That's what I'm here with you to find out.

Brian Bosire

11/10/2022 03:13:01 pm

Truly to have survived the past two years required me to step out of myself, not by forgetting who I am but to accept who I am growing in to.Growth is uncomfortable but the process can teach you alot,we all look forward to the end result of the process but the moment we are experiencing it is often overseen,the sudden change of everyday life changed and all of a sudden we had time to reflect and adapt,the fragility of life became more clear to me,to experiencing loss and to enter a new disposition, not a negative outlook but an appreciative one,because from within this new challenge I gained a lot and if I had a way to go back and assure myself that at the end it all turned out well I could've,but I have the feeling I always had that voice in my head but it tends to get drowned out.

Anna-Lynn Wicker

11/10/2022 09:19:52 pm

Under dark's ceiling, I grew to resent its appearance of comfort. The complacent loneliness, bittersweet routine, an absence of responsibility. It was too easy to find peace trapped in a single bedroom, to discover the relief of stillness from my racing heart, words trapped on a tongue, the awareness of only my presence filling any space I wandered into, watching other mouths laugh and joke at rapid paces while mine stayed shut, wondering how they fell into a natural order by now and I have not.

Where one chaos stopped, another entered. The bed was too hard, the AC unit planted in the window too droning, a headache just to not sweat pellets in the middle of summer. The British dating shows contestants over and over reminded me one thing: no one likes you when you're boring. Dreams of holding hands and dates at museums, messages that didn't go unanswered, a crevice between a neck and shoulder I could lay my head into.

I didn't want to be alone in the darkness. I waited for the boards to be pulled off the roof, the soil to be unpacked, for rays of light to enter. I waited for when they peered down at me from above and said, "Would you look at that? Finally out of her shell."

David Jessee

11/12/2022 06:31:28 am

The critic that's always been living in my head seems analogous to the real world COVID that came to reside in the real world landscape of the living. The difference, of course, is that the breath of our neighbors, our friends, the community commingled, now carries a new potential danger. Add this novel virus to the flu, the common cold, any air born pathogen. As always, we have formulated a healthy response: masks, vaccines, a respectable distance.
The judge still sits at the bench though. Having a formidable defense to others opinions is critical to mental well being. Through adversity there are opportunities to grow stronger. My internal critic has survived unscathed, yet the added maneuvering around an actual invisible threat has emboldened me to more effectively mask my critic, inject it with a vaccine of hope, and proclaim for the umpteenth time "Devil get thee behind me!"

Nell Kriesberg

11/14/2022 10:13:28 am

Covid did shift us; we are used to not looking at what’s underground, the darkness. The reality of death and suffering. We think that’s negative. That if we just try harder, we can avoid it. But we saw all these people dying and we realized that it could be me, could be you, was actually ‘us’. There is a randomness in who dies, we don’t want to admit that, that’s just too dark. We have this idea that Covid was/is some sort of unique occurrence that we need to come to terms with so we can go on as usual. But Covid is normal in nature, in life. There is darkness, and grief and mourning: what we are mourning is ‘how it is’. But now, maybe, we are accepting that if we are not here to help each other, then we all will go down. The thing is, there is indeed a shift in empathy going on because this has been made so clear that we can’t look away. So maybe ‘darkness’ (at least ‘darkness’ in terms of thinking about this prompt right now) isn’t about ‘darkness’ but about realizing that what we are mourning is ‘how it is’ and all we can do is to care more and do more, however that works out for us. (In case this sounds like I have a grip on any of this, it’s not; I don’t…I’ve just done maybe ten versions of this paragraph and this is the best I can do….)

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