I Love My Life's Dark Moments

Lessons from Rilke, Persephone, and TikTok

Swiftly, he gave an order to bright minded Persephone.
“Go, Persephone, to your mother, the one with the dark robe.
Have a kindly disposition and thûmos in your breast.
Do not be too upset, excessively so.
I will not be an unseemly husband to you, in the company of the immortals.
I am the brother of Zeus the father. If you are here

You will be queen of everything that lives and moves about,
and you will have the greatest tîmai in the company of the immortals.
Those who violate dikê- will get punishment for all days to come-
those who do not supplicate your menos with sacrifice,
performing the rituals in a reverent way, executing perfectly the offerings that are due.”

So he spoke. And high-minded Persephone rejoiced.
Swiftly, she set out, with joy.

The Hymn of Demeter, Homer
Translation by Gregory Nagy

On the Reading of Myth

The Hymn of Demeter tells the story of young Kore, daughter of Demeter, Goddess of the harvest, who is kidnapped and taken to the underworld by her uncle and God of the underworld, Hades. The epic poem follows Demeter as she roams the earth in search of her daughter and tells of the period of famine and infertility that results from the mother’s grief. The excerpt above describes Hades’ release of the newly renamed Persephone, a change attributed to her entry into womanhood through the violence enacted by her uncle. Hades is not without his tricks and before Persephone goes, he invites her to eat 6 red pomegranate seeds which will ensure that she is required to return at least part time to the underworld realm.

Last week, I wrote of myths that use literal depth (the vastness of the ocean, the underworld itself) to represent the journeys we all take, throughout our lives, back home to ourselves. Some of these journeys are joyful, as in the story of the Selkie returning home to the sea. Others are violent, disruptive earthquakes that send us spiraling down. But in a good way. The story of Persephone’s abduction and her subsequent release guides us through one of these such journeys.

To be clear, violent trauma should not, in reality, be looked upon as a means for transformation and glorified as such. Mythology, like most things, is a product of the culture in which it arose. The symbology within a particular myth may be violent if the myth arises from a violent culture.  We cannot ignore and should not condone the violence and misogyny in the narrative of this story and we can acknowledge that the violent abduction at the center is also an apt analogy to the periods of darkness we may experience throughout our lives, as sudden and forceful as they usually are. Myth is to be read beyond the literal and understood as psychologically symbolic, as Joseph Campbell argues, with each archetype, symbol, and motif mirroring a part of an individual psyche. Any repulsion we feel to the violence done by Hades forces us to look with repulsion on the violence enacted upon us by the culture we exist within and consequentially, that we enact against ourselves. 

Dark Times

I wake up each morning at 4 am. I live alone, so waking up at this ungodly-to-many hour is not a necessary sacrifice to find a bit of peace before the rest of a noisy household wakes up. It’s not a time to squeeze in a bit of CrossFit, as it is for some insane people I know. It’s not even a time for intentional meditation or looking ahead into my day. The hour from 4 am to 5 am is simply a time to sit. I might write or I might read. There is always coffee. But mostly, I sit, watching smoke from a stick of incense weave lazy eights in the air or drift skyward before disappearing. I’ve tried doing this later in the morning, on weekends when time allows, and it just doesn’t hit the same. Much was identical on these later attempts. Incense was lit, coffee was had, the right music was played, but the light streaming through the windows made me itch. There were other things to be doing and the time no longer felt like my own. It had to be dark to work and it would take a good long while before I understood exactly what magic it was that was working.

Proof of dark times.

At the start of Homer’s Hymn to Demeter, Persephone is happy (or happy enough). We find her in an expansive green field, thick with flowers, which she picks lazily with the “virgin daughters of ocean”. Life is good above the earth for sweet Persephone, but already under the ground plans are in motion to disrupt this peaceful complacency. At the moment Persephone picks the sweetest of all flowers, the Narcissus, the ground opens up, the sky darkens, and Persephone is dragged below the earth. Ain’t that just the way things go? 

Rarely do we want to welcome in the darkness, to slow down, to retreat. These dark times, as I’m calling them, or these wintering times, as Katherine May calls them in her beautiful book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat, may be literal (as in my mornings spent largely in the actual dark) or more metaphorical (time spent in solitude as we nurse some grief, some new longing, or some quiet dissatisfaction). The commonality and the necessity of both the literal and metaphorical dark times is the solitude, the time, and the space-all things hard to come by in these wild times. Living life fully, the belief seems to be, is to be in constant motion. To see, experience, do it all, all of the time, with lots of people, at a very fast pace. We glorify those who are doing IT ALL, whether it’s working the hardest, traveling the farthest, socializing the most, and tend to look upon those in a slowed down state with worry. There is validity in this- it’s great to experience as much of this weird little life as you can and it’s good to worry about your pals. But this binary view (one is either manic and happy or slow and sad) ignores the truth that into all lives a little darkness must come, lest we burn out. It’s no surprise that it’s when we’re living life the loudest that our inner Hades starts making cracks in the foundation and calls us down below.  

I recently read about a social phenomenon called revenge scrolling- in which people respond to limited agency in the structure of their days by staying up late to scroll on social media. My dark mornings are a healthier version of this (no shade- I revenge scroll too. Wholesome mornings, vengeful nights.) At their onset,  it certainly seemed I was living life well. I was traveling often, going to so many happy hours, doing yoga on the reg, hustling hard at my for money job-check check check. All of it was fun, and all of it was gratifying, but it felt so fast,  as if I was just along for the ride.  Life was so full of demands and expectations that I did not yet have the skills to set boundaries around, that these mornings, in the dark, became my time to be completely alone with myself with no guilt about time wasted or obligations neglected. Even if I tried to set my alarm later, or go to sleep later so I’d wake later in the day, my eyes would flutter open, almost like clockwork, at 4 am. Hades found a way. For some of us it may be a brutal loss and an experience of grief, for others a call from within to retreat into the shadows after being too long in the sun- but whatever the cause, our cycles in the dark will come.

Swiftly, she set out, with joy.

The poem I love my life’s dark hours by Rainer Maria Rilke beautifully describes the alchemy of time spent in the dark. 

I magically steep myself in days gone by: again I give myself unto the past: - again I live.

The time and space of our dark times allows the experiences of our lives to catch up to us- we mourn the painful moments, fully feel the joy of the good, and reconcile the vast space between them in our lives. Lessons are learned in the dark, because in the dark our souls speak and whisper the wisdom we’ve been too busy to listen to. It’s not ruminating or being stuck in the past that Rilke argues for. He calls instead to let our pasts transform us, as from water to tea, to be made stronger for the new lives that we dream of building and to be made more spacious to allow the dreams to come.

Out of my dark hours wisdom dawns apace, infinite life unrolls its boundless space.

The concept of the life-death-life cycle is found in many religious and spiritual traditions, and is mirrored in the myth of Demeter and Persephone by the six months Persephone must spend in the underworld annually, before arising again and again. It is the understanding that we must live our lives in balance with the light and the dark, the up and the down, the slow and the fast. Just as we can’t spend too long in the sun because we may burn out, we can’t stay too long in the dark because we will wither away. 

It can be a dangerous balance. Being steeped in memory, mining your life for memories, the endless quest for self knowledge- it’s fascinating and endless. It has the power to ensnare you. My dark mornings illuminated all the places I was moving too fast and brought clarity and resolve to the need to slow down and retreat. I find myself often alone, as I forego worldly pleasures and connection for endless practices designed to move my forward into a more aligned life. It’s been sacred and beautiful and- how do we know when it’s enough? 

Can our descent into ourselves become another excuse to not go after the things we want? Will we ever know ourselves well enough to feel completely confident in our choices and fearless in our pursuits? Can this aim become a trap- to know our gifts and magic well, but to excuse ourselves from sharing it while we deepen our self knowledge? 

These are questions I’ve been asking myself lately as I become a little restless in the dark. Lots of questions and few answers- I do know that this restlessness is becoming itchier by the day. Just like Hades drags us down when it’s time, whether we agree or not, maybe our time in the sun will pull us up if we sit quietly and let it.