The Good Dark

Shadows as transformative places

I’ve been inspired to write about darkness by

Layla O'Mara

’s beautiful writing and offering of space in the dark. I’ve always found solace in the extra hours of dark in winter. As a little girl I have vivid memories of the hours after dark, of walking around the stables on my aunt’s farm in the winter and putting the horses to bed at 4pm, of staring out at the silent, shadowy fields on the way home. My next online circle will be on Tuesday 10 December, ahead of the winter solstice - as a paid subscriber you get access to these circles and seasonal content too.

I take the title of this piece from a line from

Maggie Smith

’s wonderful poem How Dark the Beginning. The piece describes an experience I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time. Trigger warning: I recount a pregnancy scare when I feared I had lost my baby, in case this post is not for you today.

I have been afraid of many things in my life, but driving in the dark is not one of them. Last week I navigated my way through the countryside after twilight thinking that, despite the reduced visibility on night drives, for some reason I always had trusted I could see enough.

I’ve observed that anxiety can show up as either constant catastrophising or denial/turning away from the idea of catastrophe. The former is living in a place where your attention is unduly placed on bad things happening to you. The latter might mean sticking your head in the sand, for example, not going to the doctor if you observe a worrying symptom, or operating with the assumption, implicit or otherwise, that bad things only happen to other people. Both of them are deeply human. Both feel like protection in the moment.

Driving through the long shadows, I suddenly got the uneasy sense that my lack of fear, which I had always assumed was a kind of triumph over the irrational, was actually naivety. I thought of the actual statistics around road traffic accidents and felt silly, as if my ease had been misplaced. Shouldn’t I be more afraid of what the dark concealed?

A month before I gave birth to my son, I had a pregnancy scare. We had to rush to the hospital and as I sat in the front of the car next to my husband, I had the dull sense that the baby was dead. It felt more like reality than a fear, as if the news was breaking itself to me; with hindsight I think my mind was trying to lessen the blow, should the outcome be the very worst of all. A preparation of sorts. And I remember thinking, oh here it is, the great catastrophe of my life - the one I was so sure was always coming, without knowing what form it would take. (Was there part of me that was even relieved, that could rest now?)

Hours later, kept in overnight for observation and with the knowledge that my baby was safe - for now - I lay in the dark on the deeply uncomfortable hospital bed. I had already cried about five times at the kindness of the NHS staff, at how unfathomable it felt that this care was provided for me without cost, that this team of people were ready any time to look after women like me, to try their best to bring their babies safely into the world.

It seemed as if all the other women were asleep. I could hear a woman on a nearby ward snoring, the soft padding of the midwives’ feet down corridors, the beeping of multiple fetal monitors. I’d had a double shot of steroids a few hours earlier to help the baby’s lungs develop if he was born early; maybe it was the cortisol that was responsible for the sleep that failed to come, or maybe it was the events of the day and the way my brain wanted to stay awake to process them.

It certainly wanted to stay awake for something. I lay in the blue dark feeling tenderised, a bruised version of myself. I felt acutely aware of what it meant to be a mother, my heart open, in thrall to the primal realms of love and fear. I felt in a liminal place, one foot in the old world, the other somewhere new. Though everything was ostensibly okay now, I had glimpsed behind the curtain, the dark place where awful things can unfold and we cannot stop it.

I found a way to be a mother to myself with some sort of softness, aware of the adrenalin coursing through me from the shock and terror I had felt that day. I touched my hands, my legs, my face and my belly, I tried to soothe myself, as I worried for my daughter at home, as I worried for the kick inside. I knew I wouldn’t sleep before dawn and it was ok, I was listening; it was a vigil. I was being with myself, with my baby, with what had happened, with what could have happened.

I had thought I was in a great place of ease and positivity in my pregnancy, of trust in my body and its capacity, and I now felt almost that if I’d been foolish, thinking I was invincible, thinking I could navigate my way through those dark, uncertain places so safely. But it also wasn’t true that the shape of things was innately unsafe, either. I thought I’d been trusting but perhaps instead I had been only able to countenance the positive, unable to hold the nuance, the idea that I wasn’t totally in control all the time.

Maybe there was a middle place to inhabit. Maybe, rather than being a guarantee that everything will turn out well, trust is a combination of hope and belief about what is possible (and maybe even likely). That hope and belief contribute to the likelihood of a positive outcome, making it important, hugely so, whether we’re trying to find our way home in the dark or bring a baby into the world. Perhaps an evolved conception of hope also contains some recognition of the chaos of the universe, an acceptance of our inability to always steer the events of our life in the direction we would want. I think part of my journey has been to learn and keep learning to inhabit this middle place, one where I am more accepting of my lack of control but I don’t fixate on it, where I am respectful of dark places, the ones we should fear, without getting pulled down into constant focus on them.

There was something else as I lay there, a feeling of something in the room with me, a sense of a force, an energy. It felt like a vapour that had entered the room, heavy, filling every crevice, every section of space. I watched as it curled around me in the hospital room, enormous, formless, distinctly feminine, motherly, fierce. In that moment I felt certain that my baby would be alright, as if I was receiving a message that this force would carry him over the line to me, that I would get to keep him, that my family of four would take form. This time, we were protected.

It didn’t feel like a saccharine guarantee of safety - this fierce mother energy didn’t rule with sentimentality but with some kind of coldness or at least neutrality, as if she was just enacting a chain of events that had been decided elsewhere, by someone else. Sometimes she rescues and sometimes she abandons. She believes you must handle it either way. This time the dice had been rolled in my favour, not because I was owed anything but simply because I had been lucky - like so many other times - in the great lottery of life.

I have always gravitated towards warm maternal types, part of me wanting to be fussed over, coddled. Help me and remove any responsibility from me! I must have needed a different kind of mother in this moment, one whose no-nonsense, silent authority I could be held by, while demanding I grow myself up enough to take responsibility for who I was now. For the people I was responsible for. To accept the griefs and fears of life, the ones we can’t always avoid.

The light had gone by the time I got in my car to drive back to the city. I always forget how the dark is so much darker away from so much light pollution, how little I experience the black shadows that humans always used to experience for half the year. Is something about this necessary to us, to making us whole, the yin to the yang we’re over-exposed to?

This fundamental, unadulterated darkness has such a silence to it. I had been counting down to the moment when I escaped the dark and winding roads, but as I approached the motorway I felt a different fear, that I was leaving the spaciousness and quiet of the night that part of me wanted.

I had to head home, I couldn’t stay in the dark, even if it was what I needed, was craving, despite the fear. To sit in the dark and be with it and listen, in all the uncertainty, opening my senses to it. With the knowledge of how frightening the dark can be, and how fertile. Perhaps flights of fancy occur over long nights, our imagination arranging events into some kind of order so we can make sense of them, assembling them into a story. Humans have always told stories in the dark, a way to explain the inexplicable. Or maybe it’s not beyond the pale to think that sometimes we can access strange wisdoms that are normally imperceptible to our human brains. In the good dark when our eyes adjust, we can see something dancing in the shadows.

My son, born a month after that long night without sleep in hospital. He’ll be four in January. I thanked all the gods and goddesses when I first held him in my arms.