What happens in the darkness?

A look at underground movements and our inside worlds: how to make sense of the darkness personally and politically.

This essay will be available to everyone in this community for the next month. As Autumn comes, I wanted us to reflect on darkness as a balm, as a place where things are formed. I hope it brings you just that.

If you feel called, you can share excerpts of this on social media, forward it to someone who might benefit, or text it to a friend. Thank you for reading.

When I began, I swam in dark waters. I didn’t have to think of much, my only choice was to trust my mother, whom I didn’t know yet. I trusted that she would feed me, give me rest when I needed it, and nurture me. In there, I didn’t know who my mother was, but I did know the darkness, one might say the Darkness is the first thing I really knew,  for my human self developed in it. It was peaceful, protected, and safe. Today, when I am overwhelmed and need a moment of peace, I return to darkness by closing my eyes. When I die, I assume I will return to darkness too. 

November is a dark month in the Northern Hemisphere where I live, leaves start to fall, and every night, the darkness comes a little earlier. Today is the first day of the collaborative series I started with Kindra Calonia, it is called Poetic Antidotes In Movement, and the theme this month is Darkness. You will find the movement class by Kindra at the end of this essay. I don’t have a full ritual for today, so I will leave you with a few playlists I have been enjoying in preparation for this essay. If you do want to prep for the class I will suggest essential oils, colours and music (it’s getting sensual!)  to work with for this theme. 

This essay is meant to carry us on a journey where we can make sense of what Darkness represents both politically and personally. The movement class is meant to move the feelings that surface in this process.

I would like to acknowledge that the concept of Darkness can have different meanings. I see darkness as the unknown, as what hides in obscurity, as what doesn’t want to be seen. I also see darkness as a place I can surrender in, one that is silent and peaceful, somewhere I can be away. Darkness is also the place where liberation takes shape, where networks of sisterhood grow together and save each other, and where enslaved people can practice their beliefs freely. Darkness is where the seed of revolution is formed. I want you to focus on this darkness today, the same darkness where a human is created is where liberation is also made alive. 

Suggestions to accompany your senses for the movement class and essay (these are optional) ✨:

Essential Oils: Orange, Cypress, or Frankincense (always mix with a carrier oil)

Music: I have been listening all week to this, this and this playlist.

Candle Colours: Dark purple, Orange, Black

Wear: Nightly colours that remind you of the darkness (deep blue, black, dark grey)

Darkness is where the revolution is formed. Take mushrooms, they are only the fruiting body of an endless underground network of solidarity leading to it. Under the soil, in the darkness, roots communicate with each other about possible dangers, in part by providing nurture, to keep one another alive. They create a community of understanding, a silent, network of solidarity. This is possible thanks to a symbiotic relationship called mycorrhiza that happens between respective plants and mycelium, a fungal network that grows inside roots connecting them underground. Almost every place we walk on has mycelium under the soil, like an invisible network of survival.

In history, when we look at revolutionary movements, we notice that most of them began underground, in people’s homes, and usually at night. The Carbonari, a network of secret revolutionary societies active from 1800 to 1831 in Italy, always met at night. Nelson Mandela has recounted his nightly meetings to discuss the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa. Now, Extinction Rebellion has been reported to plan some of their actions at night. The darkness gives revolutionaries permission to plan for progression. 

Voodoo also began as an underground activity in Haiti, when enslaved people were shipped to the island to work on French Plantations. As National Geographic reports “ The slaves were baptized as Roman Catholics upon their arrival in the West Indies. Their traditional African religious practices were viewed as a threat to the colonial system and were forbidden. Practitioners were imprisoned, whipped, or hung.” Yet, the slaves continued to practice in secret, whilst still attending church masses, tricking the colonialists into thinking that they were practising Catholicism. 

New Yorker recently published an article that reported an increase in underground support networks for women to access abortion in America, since Roe vs. Wade was overturned last June. Women in Mexico are now helping American women with abortion pills and psychological support. The article follows a Mexican activist called Veronic Cruz, who believes women have a moral duty to stand up for each other when the state fails to guarantee their rights. “In part, because activists like Cruz successfully reduced the stigma of abortion, the Supreme Court of Mexico decriminalized it in September 2021. That same month, Texas moved in the opposite direction: a state law known as S.B. 8 banned nearly all abortions past the sixth week. Since then, Cruz had widened her remit, supplying free abortion pills to undocumented women in Texas.”  When a government oppresses, turning to the darkness of the underground becomes a necessity.

I also want to think of the darkness as a poetic place, one where we can look into our own interior traumas and decondition the oppressive systems within us. Darkness is the place where liberation begins. Feminist writer and thinker Minna Salami writes in her beautiful book Sensuous Knowledge, that “poetry is the language of the interior or the soul. Nature inhabits the interior of the earth, and women’s sexual organs, which carry poiesis (life, pleasure, and creation), are interior. Not only is the vagina a wet, warm and dark place, like the enclave of a forest it leads to an even more hidden-life bearing location, the womb”. 

When I read this, I touched my body and thought how inside of it, in the darkness, existed the possibility of liberation through pleasure and of the creation of life, that the rage and trauma stored inside its elephant memory, have the possibility to be moved, also by accepting my own darkness. 

For paid subscribers, enjoy this beautiful movement class to go inwards and face the darkness with beauty, with Kindra (use speakers if you can).

May you unapologetically move what your surroundings have made static.