There is a portion of almost every life where, through our grief and heartbreak, we not only lose the path but find ourselves not having the desire to find that path again, shorn as we are of what previously we loved or what made sense of our lives. Night Traveller was written to chronicle that darkness within a darkness, to which so many have succumbed: as a way of respecting the awfulness of that time; as a way of understanding the difficulty; as a way of lifting ourselves back into the light and back into the world we were about ready to abandon.
NIGHT TRAVELLER Until this loss, the clear moon had always been there, now a growing sphere illuminating your way, now a flit of light showing nothing but the shadowed outline of the trees and the cloudy opalescence of the distant sky, but now came the three days and three nights with no moon at all, hidden as it was behind the very earth you walked, your feet looking for purchase as you stumbled on the roots of trees, so that you felt as if bereft and betrayed even by the darkness that had been your friend, cut off by the night whose mercies had held you in the close circle of its arms and hidden you from sight of the sleeping world you passed, no by then it seemed even the night had made itself an enemy to your onward way as if it wanted to stop you travelling to meet them, as if it wanted, against your will to keep them from you, as if it was asking you to stay and make a shelter, so that your rebellion in the end was against the day and the night, and the sun and the moon and every season of the turning sky no matter what it seemed to want of you, until you heard your own voice in the shadows saying you didn't want to stop, didn't want to be seen in the light of day, didn't want to light a fire and warm yourself, didn't believe you deserved to warm yourself, wanted only the comfortable onward way in the dark, the stillness and the closeness to those you'd lost, and the final dark hall you wanted to traverse where you knew they lived; to knock at last on the door to your own disappearance and arrive at their side at last. -from Pilgrim
This brought tears to my eyes, thank you! It often feels like being seen in all of my humanness to read your words. From the heart ~ L
Somebody far cleverer than I said, ‘there is no mother like pain’. This poem is the journey from my dark night, daring to trust the darkness to arrive eventually at the new (old) home.