Wishing you an endarkened solstice
your wider self includes everyone
Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. —bell hooks
Dear Wanderer,
I would like to celebrate the complex interplay between dark and light on this Winter Solstice, by writing alongside the Black Feminist idea of endarkenment.
I find that I am leaning on Black feminist writers in a way I never have before in recent weeks. Maybe its because they are the lineage that holds and safeguards the liberatory wisdom I need to guide me through this time of collective (trauma and) healing, whereas I was drawn to more White writers when I was walking the more solitary road of healing personal trauma.
There is an idea in American self-help culture (as obviously stated by the name) that it is possible to heal and become spiritually enlightened on one’s own as an individual. Partly this is predicated on privilege: we can dedicate time and energy to our own personal healing since we don’t have to work as hard to keep ourselves alive. But it is also based on the fact that many of us don’t really have communities or families or even cultures to hold us (this is, of course, by design), so we damn well better be able to do it ourselves! It’s scrappy, in a way.
But it also ignores the underlying problem of our disconnection and actually reinforces it by insisting on individual experience as the metric for spiritual attainment—a misnomer in itself. I think of endarkenment as a remedy to the idea of personal enlightenment as an end in itself.
Experiences of enlightenment can feel like peak experiences. I’ve had many that were healing and lovely and necessary and unsanctioned and wild, and completely unactionable in my daily life because I was so completely unconscious to vast landscapes of my own embodied self.
I think White Americans love “Eastern” mysticism so much because it provides paths for personal liberation and withdrawal from struggle. I remember that when I was practicing yoga at studios in my twenties, one thing I loved about it was that I didn’t really have to interact with anyone. But listen, we’re already withdrawn. It’s no wonder that spiritual bypassing goes hand-in-hand with enlightenment as a goal. We act as if we can connect to a higher or wider self that is anything other than all of us.
Endarkened (Black) feminism arises in reaction to our culture of erasure and bypassing. It asks us to underline, to emphasize, to embolden and make visible counter-narratives that connect us to others who don’t have the luxury of personal enlightenment as a goal, the way individual Palestinian journalists whose stories we follow, in whose lives we are invested in, enable us to care about a people and culture we simply didn’t see before. We feel our way toward a common humanity by the texture of their cloth, the appeal of their cuisine, the smiles of their children.
The goal of endarkenment isn’t to rise above the cares of this world, but to go deep with them. Go deep with the body, it’s needs and desires. Deep with community. Deep with the Earth. Make that your practice.
I love to talk and write about death, that most beautiful corrolary to life, because it is so underloved (feared) at home, meanwhile we manifest it on a massive scale to others across the world for our own gain. To accept a larger collective, communal and even embodied self is to give death to the idea of the Sacred Individual. There is grief here for all of us raised in a culture that prizes individualism. But as always with death, there arises a new life for the Sacred Individual as member of the Sacred Collective.
2024 is a numerilogical year of 8, which, in many tarot traditions, correlates to the Strength card, which correlates with the sign of Leo, the archetype of the individual. Directly across the sky is Aquarius, the collective, whose card is the Star. So the Star is called the teacher card to the Strength card. Why? Because the individual finds its true strength in service to the collective. It finds its wholeness as a continuation of lineages and groups. It needs the wide lens, the perspective, the guiding light of the Star, to teach it how to shine.
I think I need this lesson more than anyone.
I’ve always tried to heal alone, shine alone, find my way alone. Over the past few weeks I’ve really lost my feet. It’s hard to take care of myself and balance responsibilities in the mdst of collective trauma alone. But I am not alone.
I could pay closer attention to what my body is telling me. I can look to the many teachers and guides as often as I need. Are you loving Cole Arthur Riley’s Black Liturgies as much as I am Wanderer? From a place of care I can look honestly at what it is I can give to the world with my new little baby liberation practice—and what I can’t.
I want to drop a seed in the ground for this next solar cycle that is the endarkened practice of looking to the Earth of my life—my body, my community, the Earth itself, my ancestors, which have never steered me wrong—for guidance. When I’m feeling bogged down and overwhelmed, I want to remind myself not to try to rise above it, but to go deeper into the place of endarkenment where everything heals, everything gestates, everything transforms.
Always together,
Sasha