How to Be in the Dark
Welcome to the first podcast episode of the 2023 Autumn season!
Learning how to navigate the darkness, literally and spiritually, is a skill that most of us would benefit from working on. Knowing how to be in the dark helps us to become people who are in touch with an older wisdom and can live out our deep service to the world.
Click here to listen on Spotify
Click here to listen on Apple
You can also play the episode via SoundCloud below!
Under the embedded player, you’ll find a written transcript for the show.
Welcome to A Wild New Work, a podcast about how to divest from capitalism and the norms of modern work and step into the soulful calling of these times we live in, which includes the call to rekindle our relationship with the earth. I'm Megan Leatherman, a mother to two small kids, coach, writer, and amateur ecologist living in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm your host today.
Hi friend and welcome, I am so excited to start this new season of the podcast with you. I have never started a new season which is absurd because all of my work is seasonal but you know, "doctor heal thyself..." like, we often need our own medicine. So here I am finally awake to the idea of podcast seasons and it's already been so refreshing.
I took the month off of creating any new episodes. I took a lot of time to plan and be thoughtful about who I'd like to have conversations with this fall. I've got a really Interesting and I hope enlivening and deep outline for where we are headed and I'm excited to tell you about it today.
We are fully into the autumn season.
We passed through the autumn equinox on September 22nd. If you're in the southern hemisphere, of course, you are now into the spring. all of us in these liminal periods where the light is shifting and balanced and, you know, it's not fully the darkness yet and it's not fully the light and neither one wins completely, um, but we're still in that sort of a nice, balancy kind of time.
So today I want to share an overview of where we're going to go this podcast season together. And I also want to take us into our first kind of foray into the rich, dark, wet time of year that we're in and some of the themes that we will be working with. And you know, at the risk of putting productivity on a pedestal or prioritizing it, I do just want to say a little bit about why working with the fall intentionally is so important.
Every season impacts and builds upon the next. Every season is necessary. And of course, not every season, or excuse me, not every ecosystem has the four seasons. But, That's what I'm working with here in the Pacific Northwest, and I encourage you to make this your own, that if you're in a place that has different types of seasons, or a very short fall, or a very short spring, to, you know, shift this and make it what you need it to be, what's useful to you in the context that you are in right now.
But there are seasons everywhere, even near the equator, where it seems like it's sort of the same all year. There's, there's changes constantly. Um, and the reason that the fall is so important is that it's the only thing that makes the next growing season possible. The decay... is necessary. The decay of the leaves, of the plants, the rain coming down and softening the soil and making it wet and amenable to pulling in that, you know, the nutrients from the dry rotting leaves and plant matter, the dying animals.
Everything that goes into this earth right now is being decomposed and turned into rich, Ground for what's to come in the spring and summer. And you know our culture here, Especially in North America or in the Western sort of culture, It's not very well versed in how to honor and work with waste. We're wasteful. That is true. We know how to generate waste, but we haven't really been taught on a personal level how to be respectful of our waste, how to work with it, what it can actually give to the world if done well. And we're not really taught how to be in the cycle of decay and decomposition by choice, right?
I don't know about you, but I was never really taught how to let death happen where it needs to in our lives. How to become people who can face our own eventual death in a good way. So culturally, you know, we move our waist around or we hide it away. We, um, you know, we don't. interface a lot with real death, and we don't do a lot of just allowing the natural processes of decomposition to occur, which are so healthy and necessary and beautiful in their own gross poetic way.
And the only way that anything will be able to grow again, whether it's in the ground or in your life, this next spring or summer, is if enough Matter dies and is woven back into the soil. So we're starting to see this in the ecosystem around us, especially, you know, it's happening all the time, but especially in the autumn.
And it can happen within us as well. We can awaken to these patterns and these cycles and remember that we are a part of that, that we can accelerate and amplify and honor the autumn by living it out in our own Lives. And I'll talk a little bit more about how we can do that in a few minutes. Before I take us into our opening invocation, I just want to share one update to the podcast this season, which is that I've set up a little way that you can support the show financially.
One of the things that I'm working on letting go of this autumn is my pride. You know, when I started the podcast like five years ago, four or five years ago, I sort of just decided, without thinking much about it, that it, that I wouldn't financial support for it. The show's not big enough yet to need or, you know, attract sponsors.
And that's not really something I want to do. But I also just had this notion in my head that like, I should be earning the money I need elsewhere in my business, and I, you know, I do talk about that in the show, and that's part of it, that I let you know ways that you can work with me, but the ways that you can work with me are pretty in depth and a big financial commitment, and you may not be ready for either of those things, but I know that many of you get a lot out of this time together, and some of you over the years have asked if there's a way to financially support support the show. And I've always said like, Oh no, you know, acting as if I didn't need it or that that wouldn't be nice. But the truth is that, you know, editing the show is about a hundred dollars per episode and it takes me about three hours to put each episode together. So. your support in any way, whether it's a review, or sharing it with your friends, or letting me know that an episode was meaningful to you.
And now, if you'd like to pitch in some money, some cash, that would also feel really lovely. And I think I'd like to see if it feels like a nice kind of rebalancing. For me, like, internally, that this, being open to being supported in this way is important. It's lovely, materially, but also, of course, there's an emotional and a spiritual element to this.
So. I set up a page on buymeacoffee. com. it's buymeacoffee. com slash Megan Leatherman. All one word, no hyphens. And you can pitch in, you know, five, ten, fifteen dollars, whatever, for, you know, a chai or a... metaphorical coffee, um, or you can set up a monthly subscription of five dollars a month, and I'll put the link in the show notes so you have it.
And, um, just want to say thank you for considering that, and thank you for all of you who have already supported the show through your reviews and subscriptions and sharing it with your friends. It I can't tell you how much that means to me and I'm not sure I could keep going without that. So now I will take us into our opening invocation.
So wherever you are, you can just come into your body again. Maybe you take a deep breath. Maybe you notice like one other living creature around you. Who is somehow animated by this mysterious vitality that we don't really understand. We don't know where it comes from. But it animates you and this being for a time and then it leaves.
And we don't know where it goes. So just taking a moment to sort of be with that as I read these words. May each of us be blessed and emboldened to do the work we're meant to do on this planet. May our work honor our ancestors, known and unknown, and may it be in harmony with all creatures that we share this earth with.
I express gratitude for all of the technologies and gifts that have made this possible, and I'm grateful to the Cowlitz and Clackamas tribes, among many others, who are the original stewards of the land that I'm on. Okay, so where are we headed this podcast season? Where are we headed together this autumn?
We are just doing autumn. We're going to be talking about death and darkness. Those two words came very clearly when I was thinking about what to do for the autumn season, and we're just going to really lean into the wisdom of this time. I don't think we Learn enough from the autumn, really. I know it's a very rich, celebrated time, I know so many of us are like excited about sweater weather and the pumpkin patches and cider and that is so beautiful and I will be right there with you.
And, I think a lot of us are ready to go deeper. So we're going to be exploring things like dying a good death and what that means, what that requires. We're going to be exploring communicating with the dead. We're going to be talking about working with the darkness. The people that I'll be interviewing this season They know death.
They work with it intimately. They haven't crossed that threshold themselves in this lifetime, but they know it. They're in it every day thinking about these things. They are in the darkness working with it, and they have Just rivers of joy and vitality flowing through them because of it. They know death and they live very brightly because of it.
And I've learned so much just in getting to know them and interviewing them. And I think you're going to learn a lot too. And I hope that together we can all get a little more educated and courageous. In terms of working with these big themes that have often felt like they're too big or scary or they're unnatural.
And what I'm learning is that these are two of the most natural, most beautiful, most necessary things in life. They make life happen, death and darkness. So, I'm really looking forward to this journey with you. I hope you let me know how it feels along the way. I hope you, um, can keep an open mind. And, uh, I think it's going to be really, really rich and help all of us as we decompose and let go and decay and think about what it would mean for us to have a good death and where we want to get to at the end of our lives.
So for today, I want to talk a little bit about how to be in the dark. The days are shortening. I'm noticing it already is feeling a lot darker than it did, you know, even a month ago. I wake up and I'm doing my morning meditations in the dark, which is new. And I just want to share some of what I've learned over the last... Nine months, I guess, about how to be in the dark. You know, in this cycle of the year, it's going to be getting darker and darker until the winter solstice in December. And if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, you just went through this and have come out and sort of are on the, you know lightening side of the year.
But for those of us here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are going to be enveloped more and more in darkness. And it's a skill to learn how to work with this entity, this being, this element. So I started getting really interested in this when I found out that I was accepted into Wolf Milk, which is the four day wilderness vigil put on by Martin Shaw's school and community.
So I found out I think in January of this year that I was accepted and of course was excited and also had like a big oh shit moment because I knew that it would mean that I would spend four nights out in the forest alone, no tent, no fire, just on a tarp and a sleeping bag. And my biggest fear about that experience was being alone at night, being exposed in the darkness.
It wasn't, As worried about, you know, the fasting or boredom or anything. It's, it's always interesting -everyone has a thing that they're most worried about and that is sort of a portal into the necessary medicine. And for me, that was darkness. So when I found out that I got in, I knew I was going to need to skill build in this area.
So, um, I first went on a silent night hike with Northern Emily, who was on the show a couple of episodes ago, just to help me start to get acclimated to being out in a wild place in the dark without a light. And that was really helpful, just that. One experience and then I started increasing my sort of visualizations of what that might be like.
I tried to imagine myself there in the dark, how it would feel, what I could do to feel safe, um, just getting my mind and nervous system sort of on board with the fact that this was happening, that this was coming. And then of course I went to England, I got to Dartmoor, set up my tent at base camp, we had two nights there all together, and I studied the darkness there.
The darkness is different everywhere you go, just like the ecosystem in the daylight is different, the dark is different too. There's different sounds, it feels different, there's different shades of darkness all throughout the night, and also, you know, where you are. in relation to the equator or to a large city.
And so I studied the darkness there. I got to know the sounds, the owls, the creatures. I think I heard foxes, maybe I heard deer barking at night. Just wanted to get, start getting used to that. And then of course I did the vigil, um, and like I've mentioned before, I can't talk a lot about what happened yet, but I certainly learned.
I learned a lot about how to be with the darkness alone in a wild place, in a place that is enchanted, really, and I was changed by it. It was absolutely necessary. It was one of the hardest things I've done, but I'm so grateful that I had this, like, face in the mud, sort of forced tutorial on how to be with the darkness.
And since coming back, and since The light has started to change. I have been really craving walks at dusk and at night. I have these alleys in my neighborhood that are just grass, and they feel like these old sort of country lanes, and I've just been sort of mandaring through those at dusk, trying to get more in touch with that liminal period.
And then, uh, recently also I dragged my friend Heather Dorfin, who has been on the show before, um, to go on a night hike together here, um, outside of Portland. And so we met at dusk and walked for a little while under the dusk light and then stopped under two trees and let it get dark and walked back in the darkness.
And each experience is so beautiful in its own way. There's something that feels really potent in that, and I don't think it's just for me. I think it's potent for everyone, um, at least everyone that I've talked to, you know, from Norther, to my vigil companions, to Heather, um, to my children and Chris, when we've done things in the dark.
It's really, really different, and something, like, alchemically is changing. We don't have to -And this is important, I think, about the darkness -it's enough for it to be just a physical experience. It is a, it has a spiritual dimension too, of course. But when we go into the darkness, and then we come out, and then we try to, like, shine this bright, Flood light on the experience and make sense of it and like pull it apart and put it into words.
It sort of cheapens what we've just done. So not only is that true after the experience and we wanted to kind of just let it fade into the nighttime and keep changing us in its own quiet, subtle way, we also don't really wanna bring the light. One of the biggest teachings that I've learned in the last nine months is that I feel safer in the dark without a light.
This is true on like a very practical level, like if you're, you know, out alone in the dark and you don't want to be found. By, you know, whatever predator may be human or not that you have in your mind, or if you're feeling, you know, there's just like, of course, we live in a really violent, scary culture sometimes, and we carry that into the darkness.
And if I'm alone in the dark at night, that is going to cross my mind, of course, so not having my headlamp on and shining a beacon to where I am and who I am is just practically very safe, but it's more than that. When you're out in the darkness, when you're out in a dark forest, it actually feels very disruptive, even violent, to turn your bright light on.
It's hard to put into words, but it's as if you're among sleeping people. You're in a room, in a cathedral of sweet sleeping beings and to like shine your light all around, and it's like the light has a substance of its own. It's, it's like it gets onto the bark of the trees, or onto the ferns, or onto the animals.
And it just feels better to turn it off and kind of melt into the landscape. That's been my experience, that it envelops you and you sort of lose yourself in it. So it's disruptive. It's also safer because you can't see anything else except what's on the light when you have your headlamp on or the flashlight shining.
Your eyes adjust to the light. Right? If there's a light, your eyes are going to default to adjust to see in that sort of dimension, if you will. Then when you turn the light off, you can't see shit. And that's even scarier. Right? If we can let our eyes adjust, even if it's a dark night, there's no moon or the clouds are over, there's enough light still in the ether that we can make our way.
It's what our ancestors did, and firelight is a lot different than the sort of electrical light that I'm talking about, but still. Just surrendering to the darkness is the most practical sort of safest way to be inside of this element. And it kind of reminds me of an experience I had a few months ago when I was out at Oxbow Regional Park, and I pulled up and, you know, I'm like paying for the parking pass, and there was a sign that there had been a bear sighting the day before.
And the... Suggestions on the sheet for a bear sighting are to make sure that you're making a lot of noise in the forest. You don't want to surprise a bear. And so I remember I was like doing a practice fast, and so I would be out there for 12 hours, and I did a lot of just wandering around in some more remote areas, and of course I'm thinking about the bear, I'm thinking about cougars, thinking about all the things that I'm... you know, afraid of. And so I was making a lot of noise. I was like, I had a stick and was kind of whacking it around. I would talk to myself for a little while. I sang a little bit. I tried to kind of stomp my feet. And at one point I was just like, this is dumb. Like this isn't fun. I'm just like accelerating my fear by like acting out as if I'm afraid.
And also bears aren't dumb. Like they can smell well, they can hear, they know that humans are all over this landscape. I'm on a trail, I'm not going off trail, I haven't seen any signs of bear. And also black bears, like I don't know if this one was particularly assertive or, uh, interested in humans because it's a camp and people might leave food out.
But just in general, like, I just don't think we need to be afraid of these creatures. It doesn't mean I'm not, but just like, Wandering through the landscape as if you're trying to scare everything away is such a colonialist, like, white supremacist way of moving through a landscape, and it doesn't feel good.
When I just stopped that and just let myself wander through the woods in silence, I really, I finally felt like I was able to become that. I was becoming stitched into them. I was becoming a quiet, peaceful companion to all of the creatures that were there. I didn't need to scare anything away. I could remain alert and keep myself safe without being this sort of disruptive, violent force moving through it.
And the same is true in the darkness. It's, I think, about humility. It's about coming into a place and being humble. Not imposing our fear onto the place, but letting it actually be very sweet to us, letting it welcome us, letting ourselves take a shift down in the nervous system and just, you know, relax into it and have a really peaceful experience.
And I did in that place. So, of course, a light is helpful if you're looking for something specific, like you're trying to find your keys or your pajamas or whatever. Of course, I'm not saying there's no place for light in the darkness. But overall, if you are just in it for pleasure or through necessity, I encourage you to just be there and to listen.
The light really impedes our experience. It's not meant to be there. Right? The light is meant to be during the day, and it's beautiful. At nighttime, the darkness is meant to be there and be beautiful and be big and be influential. And this is true physically, it's also true internally. Going dark internally, allowing this season to really change us and teach us, is about allowing our internal experiences to change, for our lives to change as a result.
You know. And we can accelerate this and, you know, allow it to happen more naturally if we can get ourselves in the darkness physically. Again, we don't have to overthink this. I don't, we don't have to do like a dissertation on the fall and what it can teach us. Like just get out, just go to the darkness.
Just let, just let yourself be in the darkness. It's already here probably when you're awake. I'm sure you're not going to bed at dark or, you know, getting up. at daybreak yet, you might be, but there's already darkness here. You don't have to change anything. You just have to get out and put yourself in it.
So that can be just going for walks at dusk or in the dark. It can be going out onto your back porch at night. It can be dragging a friend into the forest at night with you. It could be going camping and not lighting a fire or not using a headlamp or taking a hike in the dark. Whatever it is, I encourage you to just stretch here and just let yourself Be in that darkness in a different way.
Metaphorically or internally, we can let go of this light as well by loosening our grip on the need to know everything right now, the investigating, the trying to problem solve everything, the analysis. An interesting thing happens when you're moving through the darkness without a light. All of your other senses come online.
They're heightened. You can hear differently and better often. You can, you know, feel the ground on your feet because you can't always see the tree roots coming up. easily, so you're sensing into your, um, you know, feet, or your hands, or your limbs differently. You can smell things, you know, differently, like a wet soil, or when you're close to a tree with a certain type of bark.
You have other senses to guide you. We're a visually dominant culture, and the darkness can help rebalance some of that, and bring. all of you sort of online and you can listen deeply in your internal life as well to let go of the need to try to picture everything and visualize how it's all going to turn out and just listen.
Just listening to the messages that are trying to come through to you that might be subtle, that might be invisible during the day. Trying to loosen your grip on the mental sort of dominance in your life. You know, Libra is an air sign and it's often associated with the intellect, but it's tarot card, it's associating tarot card is justice.
And often on that card you will see a figure that is blindfolded. So this is a time to see your life differently. To not see it. The same. To hear the nighttime creatures in your life, to hear what might be trying to come through in your dreams, or in a deeper meditation, or out when you are walking at night, or, you know, the creatures of the night, owls, um, you know, crows can't actually see very well at night, so they roost at night.
You know, together once it gets dusk, but you know, their black feathers remind us of that sort of portal and connection to the underworld, to the dark, where we're headed right now. You can feel the way that the darkness feels just on your skin and be out in it and feel that sort of sense of losing yourself in it.
It's really important to lose ourselves in things regularly. That's just, I think, about being a balanced human in the ecosystem, and remembering that we can't, you know, light up everything all the time, or that maybe we can, but we shouldn't. But also, losing yourself is how you will Know, when you come back into the daytime, how you will know what externalities are ready to shift and fall away, like those autumn leaves.
If you are constantly in your daytime self, operating from that sort of mental, willed, conscious way, doing everything you can to kind of keep it all intact, just the way that it's been all summer, if you're trying to sort of hold your life together through this season, you will probably find the fall becomes a season of embattlement.
It will probably not feel very good. But if you can lose yourself in the darkness once in a while, literally, and also in the not knowing of your life and all the areas of your life that feel mysterious to you, you will come back into the daytime and you will see the contrast. You will see that it's actually safe to let go and not know or not see in the same way.
You will see that it is safe to allow things to go into the dark, allow things to die. See what in your life right now is ready for a good death. What in your life right now is ready for a death that is graceful? One that honors what that thing meant to you? It could be very subtle and just about a way that you've been orienting to your life, kind of dying away.
You might not have words for it yet. Or it could be something more concrete, like a relationship that has sort of... hung on for a while, but just doesn't have the energy to continue, or a job, or a way of being of service to the world. These things are not just You, they, they have their own energy and identity in the world.
They are their own things, and they will need to die at some point. We don't want to hang on. We don't want to ask them to be here for longer than they want to be here. These things deserve a good death, a clean death, one that honors what they've brought and what they've taught you, but that doesn't ask them to hang on for longer than they should or want to.
So, the light of our kind of mental analysis will cheapen our autumn descent this year, and it can also cause us to hold on to things longer than is really healthy. So we're all being asked to be guided by a different vision now, to be guided by our other senses, to be trusting, to trust that the darkness can be a friendly place.
Yes, of course there's wildness out there and things that might be scary, and of course we could trip over a tree limb and hurt ourselves. But there is also real medicine out there for all of us. So I encourage you to just start. small to, like, bring these ideas maybe into your introspective practice, to write about them, to be conscious of what is asking you to let go of it this season, but also to literally get yourself in the darkness, and it can be very simple.
And if you don't, if you're not into like a lot of spiritual, you know, talk or ideas like just putting yourself in the darkness is enough, that's beautiful and we could all start there and do more of that. I know that you will learn something, that it can change you, um, and so I hope you'll try it out.
That's what I have for you today, my friends. Thank you for sharing this space with me. If these are themes that you are interested in, hungry for, ready for, and you're in the Portland area or the Pacific Northwest, I want to make sure you know about my autumn workshop that will be on land and ancestor communication.
We will be literally working with digesting, practicing the skills of autumn. It's called Ancestor Speak. It's an all day workshop in an old growth forest outside of Portland. It's on Saturday, October 28th, and I think there's four spaces left, and I would love to have you there if that resonates.
And of course, if you're not in the area, but you feel yourself being drawn down into something this autumn, um, if you know that a big piece of your working life is ready to fall away and you would like someone to walk through that process with you, someone who has been through it herself and alongside many others, then I want to remind you that I do work with people one on one and you can learn about both of those at awildnewwork.com or at the links in the show notes. I hope you take such good care. I will be with you next week with an interview with someone who is really cool. I don't want to Spoil the surprise, but I hope you'll be here with me next week, and I will see you on the other side.