The sky was blue, blue, blue, light and airy with wisps of high white cloud. I could tell because I could see it through my window, having not left the bed since I’d woken up that morning. It was the second of July, a Sunday ~ I had no food in the house, I had to visit my dad, and I felt lost and purposeless, descending hour by hour into blackness.
The Ancient Greeks had an interesting concept of Night or ‘Nyx’ as the personification and goddess of Night was called. For it is in some accounts that Nyx was in fact the first being to ever exist, before the birth of the world, and that she actually birthed Gaia ~ the personification of Mother Earth that has its own religion and is how many people still refer to Her today.
St John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic, wrote a poem entitled The Dark Night of the Soul that described finding God through a journey into personal darkness. Two verses go like this:
“In the happy night,
In secret, when none saw me,
Nor I beheld aught,
Without light or guide,
save that which burned in my heart.
This light guided me
More surely than the light of noonday
To the place where he (well I knew who!)
was awaiting me—
A place where none appeared.”1
Meeting Nyx that day comforted me. She gave me the message that I believe my bones have known all along ~ that beauty and life can be born from pain and night. This is, in fact, one of the most powerful teachings ~ seeds first put out roots in the darkness of the soil. All life is born from the womb.
The psychologist and author Tara Brach speaks on this in her audiobook Radical Self-Acceptance ~ A Buddhist Guide to Freeing Yourself From Shame and it has stayed with me. At the entrance to Tibetan Buddhist sacred spaces, such as temples or mandalas, the figures of dark primeval goddesses stand ~ goddesses with animal heads embodying difficult shadow energies such as wrath, jealousy and fear. They are the ones that must be passed through in order to enter the calmness and sacredness, perhaps even the enlightenment, within. In Chapter 1, Tara Brach argues that this expresses an ancient wisdom ~ that “it is by going through the gate that we reconnect with the sacred, that we rest in the arms of the beloved. So that our path isn’t to rise above the deities or wish them away… It is through embracing the goddesses, embracing the difficulties, that we actually relax and open into the fullness of our being.”
When I look back over the pictures on my phone, it was both Nyx and Nature that saved me that day ~ the hyacinth surprising me with its pastel purple shade, my lavender plants, Lavinia and Lucia, that my mum gave me for my birthday outside my front door…
And a clematis, blooming with the last jewel-like smatterings of rain clinging to its white petals, as I made my way along the roadside beside the canal. And so I think of myself as A Daughter of Nyx ~ a tribute to the goddess who has never left my side before or since, who I am honoured to have met and who I pray will guide me still with her darkness, her gentleness and her gracious, sovereign will.
In Love&Light, FS XOX
INVIRONMENTALISM 🌷 
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