Necessary Darkness
by Shelly Eyre Graham
Illustrated by Jane Edberg
In a dream, the voice says,
You must honor the night body.
The voice is not necessarily mine. But it might be.
I wake up wondering, what is the night body?
Truth: there is a dark, universal abyss of being. Everyone and everything emerge from this abyss. So does nothing. This abyss is beyond space and time. It is not perceptible, nor can it be conceived. We cannot get outside its boundless bounds to see it. We ever issue from its fathomless depths.
Divine darkness is our source. In this necessary darkness, there is no you. All forms and names are gone. Sometimes, by grace, perhaps with the help of sacred practices, we momentarily touch in, reunite with this invisible and indivisible source.
The night body is that aspect of divine darkness that emerges from and returns to the abyss. It is an intermediary between form and non-form, between something and nothing, between the someone awake in daylight and the nobody of deep dark night.
Night body is closer to source.
Most of us seek to avoid the night body. We seek to avoid the mirage of our daylight world and self. Most of us are too scared to see the truth of our fleeting appearance and essential nonbeing.
Kismet is the night body.
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The night body is the will of Allah.
The night body is the dark side of the moon.
How may we, as beings of both, lit-day and dark-night, draw near to what is nearer-than-near yet beyond ordinary perception?
All socially-sanctioned ways of functioning in the modern world require separation, distance. We pull away from Being to form-see it. How may we continue to function in our modern day lives while also touching into, being one with, our necessary darkness?
The night body is ever near, ever here, always true, while wholly ungraspable.
Body and mind rest in the night body. To rest in the night body, self must disappear. Blissful disappearance, blissful rest.
Buoyant flowing, a sea of inter-reflecting jewels, where we glisten without light.
Shelly Eyre Graham is a climate migrant, recently moved to high desert Wyoming, where she lives in a converted church with her husband and just the right amount of cats. She is a psychologist and loves all things (and non-things) depth psychological. A lifelong seeker, she is deeply grateful for the sacred practice of writing as a means of finding.
You can find her at: www.shellyeyregraham.com
Shelly Graham has granted The Journal of Radical Wonder permission to publish.
Jane Edberg has recently completed an illustrated memoir called The Fine Art of Grieving. She writes memoir, flash, and poetry. Her work has been featured in Death and its Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Beautiful Lessons: Field Notes from The Death Dialogues Project, Cholla Needles, Worthing Flash, Gyroscope Review, and BAM 42 Stories Anthology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay’s OLLI Program. She is the arts editor and contributing editor at The Journal of Radical Wonder. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook @thefineartofgrieving, and at https://www.janeedberg.com/
