if everywhere is darkness, are we the light?

early morning intentional writing sessions for May

Hello dear friends,
Before we begin, a wee heads up that I’ve updated the membership hub with all the upcoming dates for paid subscribers and I will be back in your inboxes this Sunday with some more updates and a Joy Jumble of what’s been lighting me up here on Substack recently (there’s so much!)
And now to this week’s post, which is an invitation.
Lx

There are days, many days, when I wonder how. how. how. how.
How has humanity arrived here ?

Can we, in all honesty, call it humanity * any more?

* HUMANITY : human beings collectively, the quality of being humane; benevolence

It is hard, very hard to watch, to continue to see.
It is almost impossible not to feel helpless so much of the time.

While the world celebrates rockets carrying women into the sky at the cost of god knows how much cold hard cash and environmental impact, it ignores the bombs and brutality targeting women and their children and their loved ones on the earth below.

It ignores those starving in Sudan. Pounded in Ukraine. Those silenced and abused across the globe.

how ?

As we approached the winter solstice last year I invited all my subscribers to gather with me in the dark for four consecutive weeks. To sit in the early morning black and meet it and invite it in. To sit and see what came. It was a deeply moving and creatively rich experience for us all. We gathered again for the month of February, watching the light creeping ever brighter as we wrote in silence together.

I would like to invite you all to gather again for the month of May, for five consecutive Fridays between 6 & 7am BST.

Writer and thinker Bayo Akomolafe writes that when “times are urgent, let us slow down”, and I think there is such wisdom in this.

For this spiral of Sitting in the Dark I am picturing all of us bringing a slow, deep, intentional energy to our time together. A rich, mycelial hummus of slow, worms of thought. An energy that I hope will bring some hope, some solace, and perhaps some surprising ways of bringing light to these dark times.

For this round of the sessions I’d like to invite us to consider bringing a question to the page.

If everywhere is darkness, how can we be the light?

For the first four sessions (May 2, 9, 16, 23) we will start with a short grounding meditation and few words as a prompt and then write in silence together for 50 minutes, before briefly gathering at the end to share a word or two on how the hour was for us.

For the fifth session (May 30) I would like us to open up the hour to share with each other some of the words that we have written over the previous four weeks.

I would love for you to join us. To do so, just become a paid subscriber to beauty & bone at the link below.

If you’d like to explore some of the rich words that have emerged out of previous Sitting in the Dark sessions here are a selection of pieces that have been shared :

Lindsay Johnstone wrote about What Sparks in the Dark and how her writing came alive again during these sessions. Leanne Cosser wrote a wonderful series of reflections on her experience of the 4 weeks - thoughts around what we fear in the dark, how our relationship to dark has changed with electric light and so much more. Chloe George wrote beautifully about The Good Dark and all the different kinds of dark there is. Ellen Chapman wrote about camping dark, Christmas dark, walking in the dark in a gorgeous series of reflections.

Thank you dear friends,

Layla x

SITTING IN THE DARK DETAILS:
𖥸 Friday 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 May
𖥸 6:00-7am BST
𖥸 On Zoom, I’ll send the link the day before. Will not be recorded.
𖥸 Free to all paid subscribers