The Heart of Darkness

At 3:00 a.m. on the 13th of June, I entered a 36-hour state of sensory deprivation. After blocking all light sources from my space, I slipped in ear plugs and went deep into the heart of darkness. Below are the thoughts I recorded, in roughly chronological order.

I wake at 8:00 a.m. I know what time it is because I have light leaks. I have to get up and fix them. I will need to turn on a lamp. I feel disappointed, like I have lost a contest of some sort.

Eventually I go back to sleep. When I wake again, I realize there are light leaks I can't eliminate. Light comes through my ceiling. Who knew?!

As soon as my eyes detect the light, they begin searching for it. It is faint, unreliable. This searching requires an amount of effort I would have assumed beyond a simple eyeball. I choose to close my eyes. It feels like honor. It feels like relief.

I have a close friend who lost her sight. I think of her.

I am desperate to record this experience. To prove something? Simply to have something to do here, where there is so much nothingness? Because this experiment fascinates me?

I am acutely aware of my body. I have been working to bring my posture off of my heels, more to the center of my feet. I realize I am failing in this aim. Horribly.

I am aware of how the dental floss feels between my teeth, when a hair falls from my head and skitters down my back.

The light leaks make me feel like I am cheating. They are deeply comforting, telling me when night passes into day. The idea of not being able to mark the hours and days as they pass feels alarming. Existential.

This thought--that day could pass into night, night return its transit to day without my knowing--brings forward something I can't name. It is like a mutant form of FOMO. Heavy on the FO. Life is going on merrily without me. Also existential.

Again, I choose to keep my eyes closed.

The muddling of doing and being is vivid here, in the complete blackness, where nothing meets the traditional definition of vivid. The ways I have conflated my doingness with my beingness scream in colors more garish than any known to the human eye.

I feel like I am running out of time. In this year. In my life. I wonder, time for what?

To do something. Something that defines who I am. To be something, become something. Something I am not yet. Something that must be, but has not yet been, defined by my doing.

I wonder what these pages look like.

In a space with nothing in it, there is a lot of room for thoughts.

Who am I? Not what are my roles and titles. That answer comes easily.

Who. AM. I? Beneath the doing? I am not sure I know. But I think I truly want to.

I sit with this question, who am I. I receive this answer:

I am silence. Peace. The void.

I am creation.

I am a singular expression of the whole.

I am precious.

I am unique and I am the integration, one thread that lacks meaning when pulled from the tapestry.

I am more, and less, than my purpose.

I am afraid that I am nothing, that my existence is a lark, a chance permutation of a system without care.

I am certain this is not true.

I am loved by Love. I can feel it.

I am water and starlight, downy feathers and craggy bark.

I am salt and boron, copper and spring grass.

I am less what I think and more what I feel.

I am resonance, frequency, magnetism.

I am life expressing itself.

I am intentional. Not in the way of a strategic move, a chess piece. In the way of a brush stroke, a sweep of creation meant to combine with others and create something beautiful.

I write all of this in a mad rush and then feel called to rest again.

Only my body rests. The monkey mind is not lulled by this dark cocoon. Quite the opposite. The monkey is adrenalized here, bouncing and shrieking inside the cage of my still body.

Thoughts here are like a whirlpool, spinning so quickly that I can only catch sight of one before it spins away, replaced by one, one hundred, one thousand, one million more.

I miss tea.

The cup I have set out for water is too conical, not hefty enough. The ubiquitous room temperature of the water fails to comfort.

I am sore. My body aches from stillness.

Ah ha!

My mind grabs onto this observation and makes a plan.

Oh, how my mind loves to plan.

We will stretch. Next, a cold tub. Then, a bite to eat.

I rise, making my way to the yoga mat that is both a safe place to move and a tactile directional cue. Water is diagonal from the top right corner. That bathroom is diagonal from the opposite corner.

I stretch, enjoying the gentle movement and release in my body. I notice that I want only passive stretches. Even the simple effort of actively stretching feels unwarranted, unwanted. Sacrilegious, even. Any unnecessary effort is somehow in defiance of a faith I didn't have until I entered this darkness.

My mind frowns, sensing the dissolution of its precious plan as I become awash in the realization that I crave the stillness.

Oh my, we've gone down the rabbit hole now.

Everything is topsy-turvy.

It must surely be my unbirthday. I wish for stillness.

I abandon the mind's plan and return to bed after more distinctly uncomforting water.

My body settles. My mind rebels.

I rest a bit more, then decide I am genuinely hungry, versus considering eating to have something to do.

I am also cold. I make my way to the couch, where I have laid out a few pieces of clothing. I realize I have chosen tights for which I cannot discern the front from the back, a sweater whose neckline and hemline are elusively similar.

I dress anyway--literally.

I make my way to the fridge and grope among my pre-prepared snacks, choosing lunch meat, edamame, and juice. I take them to my mat and sit.

I start with the juice I made: carrot, celery, lemon, turmeric, orange, ginger. It tastes like earth and sunshine.

Lunch meat is next. It is incredibly salty.

I eat edamame and miss my dog, who also enjoys this snack.

I think again of my friend who has lost her sight. How does she feed herself? It is no small feat.

Without visual cues to tell me how much there is left to eat, with each item landing so new on my tongue, I find myself wanting to try new things. I return my first choices and get grapes. They taste like childhood. I can feel their tiny seeds between my teeth.

I think about those restaurants where they serve food in the dark. I believe I understand the concept now. Not that I'll be making a reservation. I don't even like dining in low light. Under no circumstances am I eating anything someone else has cooked in the darkness.

I still miss tea.

I am lonely. Not just now, I realize, but often. I don't connect often enough for an extrovert. I wish someone else was here. Not to talk, just to touch.

I imagine getting a massage here, in the blackness, how the touch would feel without light, without sound.

I consider going to get a massage. Remember that I am supposed to stay in the dark. Briefly ponder the logistics of driving to the appointment with my eyes closed. As I wonder how I would know when I reach the correct exit, I suddenly realize I'm skittering along the baseboards of reality, risking sliding out through a crack. I pull back quickly.

I can feel the writing on the other side of this sheet of paper.

The difference, the distance, between my mind and my body is so evident here. My body is happy to rest. My mind is bored, restless. My body would like a nap. My mind would like to stop this insanity and get back to...

???

I can't honestly say what. There's a strong urge to return, but the specific path of this boomerang journey evades me.

This experience is, of course, quite insular. I am alone with myself, completely removed from the outside world. At times, I forget that word exists. Then it comes rushing back in a vaguely threatening and voyeuristic way, like being mid-stream and realizing there is a hole in the bathroom wall, a clearly visible eye pressed against the far side.

I remember the suggestion that everything about an ordinary human is completely erased in a few generations. Was it two? Three?

How long have I been in here? It feels like I must surely already be fading away out there. How long would it take for me to be completely forgotten?

I sleep. And sleep. And sleep.

In some dozy moment, I see the image of a huge black and yellow backhoe filing in a void. Where material has been removed, it is slowly being filled back in.

I understand that this void has been steadily built through my entire life. It is the void of decades, of a half-century. I recognize that we all have this void within us, a debt that goes far beyond sleep.

I consider that, for many, this void began when we were but weeks old. When our mothers had to to return to work and we begun to be awakened when it was time for daycare. It begins then, in the moment when we must adhere, in even the smallest of ways, to the world's schedules. And it continues until we die.

We are told when we must wake up. When we will eat. When we will sleep. When we will learn, play, rest, perform, think, be still, change spaces. All with utter disregard for our own bodies, our needs, our desires, our knowings.

From infancy, for most. But, I think, not for me. My void began when I was two. (I will later share the vision of the void with my mother and ask her at what age she believes I had to begin following the world's schedule; she tells me age two.)

I wonder if I have enough time in the darkness to fill this massive space. If there is enough rest here to restore what has been systematically taken from me.

I vow to return if I cannot refill it fully.

I wonder who I will be when this debt is fully repaid.

They tell me (my spirit guides, the voices in the ethers, the whispers of Creation) that none of this matters. A human life is but a blip, the Earth just a spark.

I rebel, the Ego needing meaning. I shout into the meaninglessness: what if I don't change the world?

The answers comes back like a cosmic echo, softer and repeating: you already have.

At some point I am drifting off and a strobe of light from the smoke detector, which I'm unable to see with my eyes closed, wakes me. I realize I have been sleeping with my eyes open. I wonder if I will be reborn a wizard.

I long for company. My dogs, my lover, my friends, the birds outside, the touch of sunshine. This is why they use sensory deprivation as torture; we are not meant to be so alone.

I wonder how to return to these things--my beloveds--without instantly being pulled back into the illusions, the literal insanity, of modern life.

I wish there were starlight here. Not for its illumination, but for its nature-ness.

About 36 hours after I shut off my bedside lamp, I sense that my time here is complete.

I feel fully rested.

My mind is no longer screaming, shaking the bars of its cage. It wanders blissfully now, tripping along paths lit by soul-light and a knowing that existed before time.

I feel that I have been experienced a deep detoxification; I can feel the release all the way down to my DNA, feel the gunk and grime draining away. The void seems filled. Nature calls to me.

As I prepare to turn on the lamp that last left me on the edge of the precipice from which I've been falling for the last day and a half, I wonder...

How I can hold what seems so obvious here through the noise and pressure that waits for me out there? How can I go back without going backwards, return without returning to who I was before the dark taught me who I am?

I wonder if this stillness is the true essence of everything, if with our giant brains humans have done nothing more than create prisons and suffering for themselves.

We're so determined to exist beyond nature, so certain in our hubris that we can rise above. There is no such elevation.

We are nature. There is nothing else to be. Creation is everything and everything is Creation.

We humans over-think it, on every level. I laugh as I imagine a lion, laying restless on the savannah, consumed with the thought that there are so many gazelle.

As I reach for the lamp, I am given this gift parting gift: There will always be things to do. There will always be time in which to do them. Until there is not. Until I reach the end of my time. And when that day comes, the things to do will no longer matter.

The secret to returning from the darkness without being swept away by the return of all that comes with the light is this: On the day that I die, the things to do will not matter one whit. And on that day, they will matter no less than they do right now, and in every moment until that day arrives.

Image credit: Tan Dahn via Pexels