Matches in the Dark
I had just graduated from high school. I was all of 18 and had no idea what I would do next. The spaciousness between what was and what might be was extremely exciting, and I had a sense that anything was possible. While the uncertainty did stir fear, it also generated a strong sense of awareness of the preciousness of each moment and a powerful connection to life right as it was unfolding.
On the night of a new moon in July, well after dark, a friend and I spontaneously decided to go camping. Not far from my house was a national forest, and I knew of a trail shelter where we could sleep. Grabbing nothing more than a few blankets and some snacks, we raced out the door and weaved our way through a maze of dirt roads to the trail head. Upon closing the car door, the full depth of the darkness enveloped us.
Night is rarely as dark as most people imagine. Even if you are miles from the lights of a city or small town, once your eyes adjust, the light of the moon and stars usually provides ample visibility to navigate. For most people, moving about in the dark feels particularly uncomfortable and dangerous, because they never give their eyes time to fully adjust. But, if you do give yourself the opportunity to go night hiking, you will begin to discover that you can move quite skillfully in low light and that all your other senses will become amplified to assist you.
On this night, after we closed the door of the car and the light went out, something was different. We stood on the dirt road waiting, but there was nothing but blackness. We could hear each other’s voices but could not even see one another, though we stood just a foot apart. In fact, I tried bringing my hand right up to my face and still could not see it. This was one of the rare nights when it really was pitch black. There was no moon in the sky, and the clouds were so dense they blocked out every star. Under the thick canopy of the forest no light came through.
Our supplies did not include a flashlight, so even taking a step down the trail to the shelter required starting the car back up and using the headlights to locate the path. In the complete darkness there was only one way to move forward and that was by feeling the ground beneath us. The earth will always tell you the appropriate speed to move if you listen, and we were listening very closely! A few steps into the forest and we knew that if we lost the trail we would end up lost till the morning. We moved with rapt attention to what our bodies were experiencing. The trail, having been hiked many times by many people, was devoid of all vegetation. Our feet could feel the texture of compressed earth beneath us. We could not really walk down the trail, but we could feel and step and then feel and step again.
It might have been stressful if we had decided that this was not what was supposed to be happening. Becoming frustrated or bracing against life when things don’t go to plan is a common reaction, but thankfully we do not have to always act out our defaults. Primed for adventure this night, we let the entire experience simply unfold, confident that we were okay, even though we were uncertain. Occasionally we would misread the ground beneath us and unknowingly take a few steps off the trail. The bushes and branches of trees we encountered would alert us that we were going the wrong way. Moving as slowly as we were, and by feeling even more carefully, we found our way back a few steps and were on the path again.
Eventually though, we became so disoriented that we couldn’t figure out how to proceed. For that moment, we realized that the “right speed” was to not move at all. Instead, we stopped and pulled out a box of matches. We didn’t have very many, so we had to use them sparingly. But we had enough to use one now that we felt truly lost. One match held high felt like a lighthouse in the dark that guided us back to the path. When we eventually reached the trail shelter, we thought about lighting a celebratory campfire but surprised ourselves when we both decided to spend a little more time just listening deeply in the dark.
Try: Bring to mind a place or situation in your life in which you are struggling to find your way. Now, imagine that you have all the time in the world to get where you are going. It’s okay that you are uncertain of what comes next. It’s okay to just slow down and feel your way through. Take some time to reflect on what or whom you have turned to in the past in uncertain times that helped illuminate your way—your matches in the dark or your blazes on the trees. Write down the tools, practices, or people that have been valuable to you. As a way to make these more immediately accessible, incorporate a few of them into your routines this week and notice how that feels.