“Hello darkness, my old friend, I’ve come to talk with you again” – because in the creeping silences, as the light starts to fade and the momentum of the day loses its rhythm and rhyme, it is to you I turn. You are the missing link in the narrative. The lost puzzle piece. You complete me. You are my shadow, my sanctuary, and my respite. Ever since I can remember, these Simon & Garfunkel lyrics have caused me to stop and sigh, stirring within me a profound existential yearning for a reconciliation with the inherent darkness that I have been instructed to cast adrift by our diurnal religiosity and bias for the light. Like an invocation, these lyrics act as a beckoning call that urgently needs to be answered, to embrace an urge that cannot be suppressed any longer, an inherently animalistic desire to return to a time that predates dualistic fundamentalist reductionism when the light and the darkness were once holistically appreciated. To a reunion, to reconnect the polarities that are in fact intrinsically reliant upon each other, co-dependent even, as pertinently modelled by the Taoist concept of yin-yang, in which the dark and the light cannot be separated but are dynamically interwoven.

So, I turn to the shadows, close my eyes, and subsume myself in the cave within, a sanctuary that calls me home every night, abiding in slumber to a prenatal memory, to a pre-corporeal existence immersed in the great dark unknown where everything is one, where individuality and duality is a ruse, a laughable conspiracy, beyond possibility. Here I float, detached from ego, and deprived of senses, in what German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk refers to as the “primal bubble,” in which synthesis occurs and selves collapse in a slushy “foam” of symbiotic relations. For in the darkness there is no illumination to distinguish form, hard lines, and separation – it is instead an opportunity to merge oneself within “spaces of coexistence,” to what Buddhists refer to as experiencing a state of śūnyatā, an absolute appreciation of nothingness, when all things are devoid of intrinsic definitions, meanings, and purpose. Weightless, submerged, the darkness relieves all anxiety, stress, and pressure to conform, excel, and compete, as we swirl formless, together, as a primordial soup of infinite, unknown possibilities. Here I can finally rest, let go, and recuperate, without fears of judgement, comparison, and competition.

And as I float unprovoked, glittering epiphanies enlighten my endarkenment, what Celtic seers often refer to as gléfiosa, or the “bright knowledge,” and renown Celtic practitioner Caitlín Matthews describes as waiting for us “in the silence of darkness, shimmering.” As such, the more I let go, and the more I embrace my endarkened state, the more “bright knowledge” appears. For, from within these cavernous sources, darkness flows saturated with teachings, rich with memories and reflections that over time have permeated the layers, masks, and performances that we adorn to protect ourselves from the insufferable glares of the limelight. An aquifer of “bright knowledge,” where the suppressed, hidden, forgotten, and lost becomes crystallized pearls of wisdom waiting to be rediscovered and reclaimed. As artist and performer Lucy Cordes Engelman explains in her profoundly spiritual creative exploration into the teachings of the Aurora Borealis, that without the darkness the Northern Lights cannot be seen. In order to experience such “bright knowledge” we therefore depend upon the darkness as a canvas, a backdrop, a milieu for the enlightenment to occur.

And in the darkness, yet exposed by the all-pervading light, colors and shapes of all shades and sizes can still exist, untarnished and unrefined in a state of infinite potentiality. As such, as Engelman beseeches, to embrace the night and the darkness is an act of decolonial protest and aesthetic, whereby all voices, stories, and epistemologies are possible. Endarkenment therefore equates to inclusivity, uplifting the authority and agency of all indigeneity, whilst enlightenment delineates exclusivity, bearing hegemonic normativity and singularity of the colonial rule upon one and all. Moreover, endarkenment decenters the human from the narrative and offers room for all species to belong and be heard, returning us to a primordial state, to a form of communication beyond our all-consuming myopic anthropocentrism. To endarken is to align with our animality and to be in communion with a common animist potential. Where the rivers course and channel, the land throngs and beats, the animals sing and cry, and the plants sway and sigh. A prehuman animist reality that always existed within and around us – a “polyrhythmic pulse,” which preeminent ecologist and philosopher David Abram identifies as “a style of speech that opens our senses to the sensuous in all its multiform strangeness... a language that stirs a new humility in relation to other earthborn being.” An ecocentric ontology that promotes relationships and interconnections, which far exceed the limitations of a homo sapien kinship, and that offers a framework for an entangled animist sacrality, “blending our skin with the rain-rippled surface of rivers,” merging with the “dark water seeping up within the ground.” As Abram beckons in his entreaty for us to become more animal, “listen close. Something other than the human mind is at play here.”

However, as infamous psychonaut Terence Mckenna famously diagnosed, “nature is not mute, it is man who is deaf.” A deafness that has left us in a solipsistic echo chamber, trapped in our own thoughts, alone in an absurdist existential battle to communicate with something beyond ourselves. And yet, all we hear and see are ourselves – competing to be heard as we try to shout the loudest. A vacuum of anthropocentric cacophony, stabbing wildly at our own reflections. What esteemed environmentalist Paul Shephard refers to as “an irrationality beyond mistakenness, a kind of madness,” whereby our disconnection to everything but ourselves has left us alienated not only from our inherited ecocentric ontology, but also our natural ontogeny. A disruption which Richard Louv astutely identifies has left us with a “nature-deficit disorder” – a traumatized post-animist state of alienation and muteness. Yet, beyond locating the problem and arguing that we need to realign with our animality and our common animist potential, there still exists the daunting challenge – how do we reconnect? How do we unmute ourselves? How do we learn to communicate with nature and reinitiate our disrupted animist ontogeny? Well, for me, the first step is quite simple, I turn to “darkness, my old friend,” because beyond respite and reconciliation for myself, endarkenment offers us all a chance to submerge once again into our surroundings, beyond visual stimuli, reconnecting us to what we had previously ignored and suppressed – our own animality, simmering under the surface of our all-encompassing humanity. As religious scholar Ayesha Adamo succinctly identifies, “she is the invisible presence, the teetering edge of sacred Earth beneath,” waiting to be rediscovered.