Like many others, I’ve had the kind of life where I lived in darkness a lot of the time. A difficult childhood that felt lonely and full of fear. An adulthood marked by dysfunction, trauma and wounding; from my childhood, the family legacy of generational abuse and probably trauma from past lives as well. Such a lot to process and this is a part of the reason I didn’t have children, I knew deep down I needed to clear myself of all these burdens and their disruptive patterns so that I didn’t pass them on anymore and it took way longer than my child-bearing years to do it. For the most part, I did good. And I learnt how to dive for the light.
We usually say ‘reach for the light’, don’t we? Reach for the stars. Diving for the light is different, diving for the light means going down into the dark to get to the light.
Imagine you are treading water in a deep mountain lake in the middle of a moonless night. The only way you have any sense of where you are is because the bottom half of your body is in water and the top part is in air. Now, imagine taking a great, deep breath and diving down.
There was a day when I nearly watched my husband drown. He was in the sea and there were others on the beach and in the sea. The tide was coming in and there was a sand bar. The sand bar made the waves bigger and rougher, they looked playful but what was not visible was the rip tide under the surface. My husband and a young girl became caught in the rip tide, they were desperately trying to swim to shore, touch their feet on the bottom, but as much as they tried, they didn’t move an inch. I watched and saw them both get tired. I screamed to him to grab the girl and swim out to sea, to break away from the rip tide, not fight against it, but he couldn’t hear me above the sound of the waves and the noise of people playing all around. Nobody else seemed to notice them, so I screamed louder at everybody around me, I screamed out and pointed that my husband and the girl were drowning, because they were. They were both rescued but not before they each accepted that their life was going to end there and then, they had nothing left to fight with. It hadn’t occurred to my husband to swim out to sea, it seemed completely contrary to common sense, he continued striving for the shore and was going to die trying to reach it.
Sometimes, we have to do the opposite to what our instinct says in order to find what we need to survive. And that’s what it means to dive for the light. We dive into the darkness because that is where light is born. It means being able to accept the darkness, being able to love the darkness. It means we don’t get upset with the hard days of pain or sadness, we embrace them. We don’t feel like victims but like survivors. We don’t feed our story of trauma but allow it to unfold. We don’t hide our wounds but celebrate them. We don’t stay in the dark, because we know how to find the light in it.
