sitting in the dark

an invitation to join me | wombs, cloaks, seeds, candlelight

Hi friends - for those of you new here you’re so welcome! I’m Layla – I’m an Irish writer & tender to many things living at the foothills of the Wicklow mountains in south eastern Ireland. I’m interested in exploring how it feels to write, hold and (m)other on this beautiful, tattered planet right now.

I think of the beauty & bone community as a small yet mighty gathering of like-minded souls, determinedly fumbling towards a brighter future. For paid subscribers I share through weekly written posts (the heart of it all), live seasonal calls (where we get to explore, connect & support) and my slow podcast (for deeper dives in your own time). Plus a new offering I write about at the end of this post! You’d be so welcome to join us.

And now, on to this week’s post.

We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light
I want to call this, life.

Adrienne Rich, ‘Origins and History of Consciousness’

I have been seeking out the dark. Rising early, groggy, resistant. Stepping out of the house into the cold blast of night after everyone has gone to bed. I’ve been looking for it in an active, intentional way. Letting it be there, inviting it in, switching off electric lamps, closing my eyes as the morning light turns the sky from black to grey. Rising this morning at 5:30am I stepped through a cool pool of moonlight on the stairs. Walking across the front drive to my studio, the light of the waning Hunter’s Moon lit the dark. I saw a shooting star flash through the black sky. Typing this to you now, I have turned down the computer screen to its lowest brightness setting, I have not turned on the lights in the room.

A month ago, I was in a messy place. Grief and anger and the stresses of life knocking about in my heart and head. My heart and head knocking off my partners, too. We were not getting along. Speaking with a good friend, she observed – ‘You keep talking about the horizon, of being afraid of not being able to see it, of the panic this causes – I’m curious what that might be about. Why are you afraid of not seeing the horizon? Why do you always need to seek the light?’

Out of this question, the idea to sit in the dark grew. How would it feel, to sit somewhere there was no ‘over there’? How would it feel to sit somewhere that just was, that did not offer distant places to travel to? To be enveloped instead of expanded? And so I decided to seek out the blackness, find places I could sit with nowhere to look but in

It is harder than you might think, to find the dark. The fairy lights behind the piano wink in the black, the cool blue of the alarm sensor throbs. In the sitting room I wrap in a blanket and try to just be. But my eyes are intent on finding a focal point, they are adept at discovering the subtlest of glows. Even at 5am on an October morning in the depths of the countryside, there is still a gentle light to the sky, a hint of a difference between the ebony of the trees and the washed out black of above. My eyes grow used to the dark, they find shapes and shadows and outlines where they can.

I experiment, too, with closing my eyes, with trying to feel the dark rest on my skin. It is soothing, this. I imagine the darkness of my insides and the darkness that is surrounding me melting into each other, of the borderline between me and the nocturnal world dissolving.  

I have explored the dark within me before. In my memoir I write about how, when trying to find ways to heal and soothe the pain of the massive debilitating fibroids I had growing in my womb, I had often been guided in meditations to imagine a bright and healing light glowing within my pelvic bowl. Light, it seemed, was considered the cure. But it never worked. I could picture some form of light flowing through my limbs, dancing across my chest, down my spine. Then I would reach my uterus and find I could not penetrate it, it was a deep, pure black.

It took months and months, maybe even years, for me to discover that my womb-space was not a place that required a blinding, healing glare. That the darkness was comfort, it was home, that my womb was meant to be lit in the half-light, to be mercurial, a shadowland. I had been diving within with a gas tank and a powerful head lamp. I needed dive in the dark with only my lungs for air.    

I am struck that it is perhaps the dark I need now, too, in this cusp period of perimenopause. A gentler, fermenting, crucible space into which I might drop down and see what wants to be shed, what I want to bring forward with me into this next chapter of my life.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
David Whyte

I was reminded of this womb-space dark as I stood at the end of our garden two weeks ago, looking up at the night sky, seeking out the light. Earlier, my phone had lit up with messages about the aurora borealis, and my husband and I had stepped out into the black to see what we could see. Even from the far end of the garden, the glare of the lights from the house were uncomfortably bright. I thought of how ignorant we are so much of the time, unthinking about the ways we push the night away with the flick of a switch.

Even without the long exposure framing, there was a faint pink smudge in the sky, and through the filter of the phone the sky was alight with pinks and greens and yellows. It was beautiful. But it was the darkness that I loved even more. I walked away from my husband taking photos of the sky and down a small path along by the stream that edges our land. I was struck by how still, how quiet, and cloaked everything felt, but also how alive, how teeming this darkness was. The stream gushed on. The field beyond seemed expectant, burgeoning and yet epically still. I felt licked by it, I felt soothed by it, I felt welcomed, held. I felt fuller, more alive. It unsettled me, too. The expectant, passive-seeming waiting. The sense that here was enough, that all could just be. I found it hard not to seek out the horizon.

I am curious about what I might be able to learn from the dark.
What I am afraid of?
What I might discover if I settle here for long enough?

Realising that my wombspace was a darkspace was a massive turning point for me in terms of my relationship with this part of my body. It enabled me to get to know this place before I gave permission to finally let it be removed. I’m curious about what else I might learn.

We are at this point on the planet being enveloped by the dark. We are experiencing a brutal wintering. I am curious about whether there might be some wisdom in finding ways to let the darkness in rather than constantly trying to switch on all the electric lights and blast it away. I am struck by how when I rise early and write by candlelight there is such a different energy to when I write by an electric light. The dark isn’t banished, it stays and holds me, the candlelight nudging aside just enough for me to see my pen on paper.  

Seeds, of course, all begin in the dark. Babies, too.

And so I’d like to extend an invitation.

Would you like to sit with me in the dark?

For four weeks at the end of the year I invite you to rise early with me one morning a week. **

Make a warm drink, light a candle, no electric light, and join me for an hour in the dark.

I’ll share a short opening mediation or reflection and then we will write together for 45 minutes by candle light.

It will be a way to move gently towards the close of the year.

It will be a way to commit to a creative practice for a month.

It will be a way to gather. It will be a way to witness.

It will be a way to sit tenderly in and with the dark and to see what comes.

Here are the details:

𖥸 6-7am GMT
𖥸 Friday 29 Nov, 6 Dec, 13 Dec, 20 Dec
𖥸 On Zoom
𖥸 Free to all paid subscribers

Hit reply, pop a message in the comments or DM me if you would like to join.

Next week I’ll also be sharing a conversation with my wonderful friend, cyclical guide and global gatherer of women Mari Kennedy about all things dark of part of the Element Sessions podcast series.

Layla x

** Or perhaps you are at the other side of the world, and it will be getting dark. Or elsewhere in the world, you might be curious about where that enclosing energy can be found in the high heat of a day.