August 23rd, 2026

The Dark That Dances

~

the water is churning again.

news arrives dressed as prophecy. the wind is given names now, the way we used to name saints. and i ask the old question, the one that never quite closes: is the world friendly to me, or is it only indifferent.

still, there is tenderness here — a hand on a shoulder, a story told twice because the first telling mattered. i cannot make the water calm, but i can be calmer water for whoever is standing next to me.

i can look for the people, the rooms, the practices that remind me i belong here — that i am not only drifting matter, but drifting matter that showed up anyway.

the world may be indifferent. i do not have to be.

no answer comes. the storm does not hate me. the sun does not love me. and still, i am here — a small awake thing on a spinning stone, made of the same dust as the comet and the tide.

~

hope arrives first, usually. it says: stay. it says: the light under the door has not gone out. i want to believe hope is the whole of the practice, that if i just hold on long enough the clouds will part and show me i was right to trust.

but hope alone is thin. it can become a wall i build to keep the dark out.

and the dark is not my enemy. it is the door i keep locking.

~

there is a story of a spark that fell into matter and forgot where it came from. it wakes slowly, mistaking its cage for its whole self, mistaking the noise of the world for the only voice there is. the waking does not happen in the light. it happens in the falling — in the place where the spark finally admits it is lost.

there is a teaching that says the self must be annihilated before it can be trusted with anything real — not destroyed the way fire destroys, but emptied the way a cup is emptied, so something larger has room to be poured in.

there is a night written about by a monk in a spanish prison cell, a night he called dark not because god had left, but because god had gone quiet in a way that felt like leaving.

there is a garden where a teacher sat beneath a tree for three watches, and the dark did not part before dawn — the dark was the doorway dawn walked through.

there is a flower that is famous for growing only out of mud, that will not open in clean water no matter how much light you give it.

there is a dancer who is also a destroyer, whose steps end worlds so that worlds can be made again, whose dance nobody survives unchanged.

none of these stories are mine. all of them are mine now.

~

so maybe hopelessness is not the failure of hope. maybe it is hope's invitation — the moment the wall comes down and i finally walk into the room i was avoiding. maybe the point was never to keep the storm out. maybe the point was to let it show me which parts of the house were never load-bearing.

i have lived long enough to watch my own certainties fall like scaffolding. i have watched what i thought was solid ground turn out to be something i was only standing on out of habit. i have said the amends i owed and felt the floor hold anyway.

~

i do not know if the universe is friendly. i no longer think that's the question worth keeping.

the mud does not love the lotus. it only holds it long enough.

so here is what i am left with, standing in the weather, unsure if it will pass or worsen:

if the dark is not punishment but doorway — if the mud is not failure but ground —

then what is asking to be born in me, right now, in the middle of not knowing?