Weekly Wide-Awake: Learning To Walk In The Dark

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: Learning To Walk In The Dark

I started reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk In The Dark in women’s group early this year. (We read a chapter and share our thoughts about it monthly.) Prior to reading the text, and talking about it together, I had never given much thought about how we are served by both light and dark. I had never thought about the gifts of darkness. I had never thought about the way we — in thought and language — turn away from our darkness, rather than try to understand and share it.

I guided a writing workshop in August with our group using “golden lines” from Brown’s text. Twenty or so of us took a few minutes to write about randomly selected “golden lines”. After writing, those that wanted could share their writing. That exercise inspired me to select “golden lines” from the text and write about them myself.

This Weekly Wide-Awake is my collection of thoughts about learning to walk in the dark.

A Light That Shines In Darkness

There is a light that shines in the darkness, which is only visible there. — Barbara Brown Taylor

Hitting bottom. Falling to pieces. Being at my worst. Failing miserably. Getting my butt kicked. Losing my way. Burning it all down. These are some names for darkness — for moments when my light is separate from my self. I know these moments in my bones. I call them by name. I know all the details. I carry their weight. They visit me in my dreams.

In all of this, there is a light that shines.

To Need Darkness As Much As Light

Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. — Barbara Brown Taylor

We need darkness as much as we need light. It saves our lives.

How does darkness save our lives?

Darkness saves our lives by revealing what we may not see in the bright light of day — our truths, our knowings, our moon wisdom, our secrets, our quiet parts. Through revelation, we know ourselves and heal and find our way to love. Through revelation, we create peace and strength. Through revelation, we excavate and heal.

Large, Bright, and Unmistakably Holy

While I am looking for something large, bright, and unmistakably holy, God slips something small, dark, and apparently negligible in my pocket. How many other treasures have I walked right by because they did not meet my standards? — Barbara Brown Taylor

I, too, search for the large, bright, and unmistakably holy. I crave the shiny, the soft, the exuberant, the just outside my reach, the bigger than life. In my thirst to be wide-awake, I hurry to pay attention. How do I step back and seek something else — quiet and deep, thoughtful and kind, smart and funny, beautifully broken and healing, (and yes even) small, dark, and negligible? What is holy in the light? What does paying attention look like in the dark? Maybe large, bright, and unmistakably holy live in concert with the small, dark, and apparently negligible?