The song of the dark years

It is often said that our children become our best teachers and I have never doubted that for a moment.  Children are torchbearers. They are created in darkness, birthed into the light.
As they enter the world their light shines out from the purest source of love. How can they be anything other when they have not yet learned the harshness of the world’s rules nor how to roll the dice and play?

Just as we entered our first UK lockdown in March, our son Gabriel finally received a diagnosis of ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder alongside other associated, neurological disorders’. 

His diagnosis and the long process that proceeded it, eventually forced me to look at what I had tried so hard not to see in myself.

How much precious time we waste like this?
Learning not to see in the dark?

Seven years earlier a complete stranger had triggered a lifetime pain body with the words,

‘your son has the name and face of an angel, but behaves like the devil.’

He was just over two years old at the time. Fortunately we never saw the person again. Nevertheless, that one sentence proved to be the sufficient nudge off an edge I’d been strategically tip toeing for years.
I felt it as a mother but also as the child.

The truth is, that for all of his nine years my son has shone so intently and fiercely into the darkness of my own ever present and terrifying shadow.  What I saw in him was everything I felt unable to stomach about myself and therefore fought to reject entirely. 

 This is the light the torchbearer carries
They help us to see in the dark
They inspire us to light our own torch and look for ourselves

Eventually, through him I started to comprehend better my own hyper vigilant nervous system. One that perceived everyday conversation and seemingly normal exchanges as very real threat.

That what had gone undiagnosed and unacknowledged lay festering at the source of countless relationship breakdowns, and consequently our own tumultuous relationship.

That the efforts channelled into coping and existing within a world and systems which never truly made sense and only ever favoured light, would render me bed ridden for days on end; disembodied, disempowered, disheartened, crumpled in on myself with sickness.

That my own heart was frantically working to filter endless incoming streams of disproportionately confusing sensory information.

That the darkness and obsessional thinking I had fought my entire life to overcome, was not something broken, to be fixed, hidden away from the judgements of others or somehow transmuted into luminous rays of light; but something to be loved, explored, shared, compassionately helped off its knees and perhaps even eventually - utilised as a gift.

‘Well I said:

‘Lily, Oh Lily I don’t feel safe

I feel like life has blown a great big hole through me’

And she said:

‘Child, you must protect yourself

You must protect yourself 

I’ll show you how with fire’

- Kate Bush

Among the wreckage of plans gone awry there are infinite gifts now unfolding

Reframing our son as a wizard of sorts, instead of a difficult, non-conforming child, has offered answers to questions I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

I have taken to asking him regularly if he wants to share his dark thoughts and worries with me. That one act has created such a powerful healing shift in our relationship it is genuinely quite astonishing. He will often now come to tell me what he fears the most and I will listen and tell him,

“I’m here for all of you”

Of course we do not need to be parents though to be able to see into the dark or offer the opportunity for others to do the same. I wonder regularly what would happen if we said these words to friends, family, loved ones?

The point is, each one of us has the capacity and talents to light the ceremonial torch to see our way home to wholeness. Our souls chose our bodies, at this time and what a time to become a torchbearer.
But the journey from fear to wholeness is near impossible, if we cannot learn to respect, embrace and harness not just our talents but our personal responsibility.

This is not the braying individualism which screams endlessly for attention:
“I’ll do whatever I want no matter what the cost is, or who it harms”

It is in part the emotional maturity to desist in asking others to hold what we cannot bring ourselves to.
It is the allowance of the stranger and weirder aspects of our natures, to animate and inform our lives.
It is the personal responsibility to tend to our own shadows.
In this way perhaps the collective can create a loving and brave space that honours individuality without elevating it out of reach.

Society has harmed all of us by creating systems that do not allow this to be the case.
If we do not look into the dark, if we cannot begin to recognise these black times as an opportunity to reassess and take personal responsibility, if we fail to individually and collectively increase our capacity to hold a broader range of more challenging emotions, behaviours, idiosyncracies - and now - the wound will move much deeper into the collective psyche.

It is really on all of us

This is sacred. 

This sort of rebellion wraps protective arms around our lives and says 

I will take care of you.

 I will nurture you.

 I will make sure you have what you need so you can thrive and do everything you were created for. 

Sacred rebellion says: 

These are my borders. 

These are my boundaries. 

These are my conditions. 

I will take ownership of my life, my calling, my dreams, my gifts, my hungers, my purpose, my personal responsibility. 

It says: this is what I need. 

I must see to my own life. 

I have important work to do.

It says: no.

Each unique glowing ember then becomes a flame, and the collective field glows infinitely brighter and vaster.

In this way we each one of us hold the complexities of this time.

The collective is able to live and breathe in a greater practice of spirit and care. 

A collective of Torchbearers