I kept watching and listening to the Magpie Robin from the courtyard. I noticed the cat who lives in our property in the Christmas tree. The Robin high in the sky and the cat high enough to watch its gaze kept me fully engaged in watching the dusk arriving.
The gradual fading of the light and the sky turning crimson made the sight most captivating.
The bird songs gradually settled to bring in a calm that was a striking contrast. The trees turning dark and still and the visibility reducing were striking sights.
What was unique for me was participating in the transition of the nature's retreat from the day!
It is in and through this retreat of darkness that nature completes its rhythm of the day and night.
For children and adult alike, darkness brings in an emotion of fear or caution!
Some writers refer to luminous darkness as an experience they discover while going through 'interior darkness' during times of contemplation.
For them contemplation is an experience of beholding God in interior silence and stillness !They refer to it as an experience of being freed from thoughts, sights, dreams, plans, imaginations, or feelings, which they admit is one sense entering in to darkness or emptiness.
They refer to the outcome of this experience as communion with God, which results in an inner radiance and revival.
As light of the day became darkness, I felt unusually inspired by the luminance of the sky that lasted even in the darkness of he dusk.
By then it was the time for listening to the 7 pm TV news. I felt what I saw and heard jarring inside that I returned to keep watching the sky!
All was calm and serene.
The inner instinct was to stay still and silent because, the experience of beholding darkness was truly luminous inwardly!
I felt carried and comforted and even felt drawn to a deeper plane of consciousness of something beyond self! How refreshing and enlivening it is to feel being taken away from the consciousness of self to experience of the consciousness of the 'Other' to the extent that we can receive for a transient season!
Such occasions of life are GIVEN as way marks in our inner journey towards God, the source of being and living!
M.C.Mathew (text and photo)
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