In ‘The Book of Hours’ the poet Rilke writes:
Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
Over the last few months, as I’ve been delving into my own “darkness”, I came across this quote by Nigel Wellings and Elizabeth Wilde McCormick, in their brilliant book ‘Nothing To Lose’:
At the point of greatest darkness things change. The hero’s journey to the underworld is a transitory event that cannot last indefinitely. At some point the struggle with the tests, tasks or trials begins to bear fruit and at this point the dark passage opens towards the rebirth. The fruit of this rebirth is essentially very simple. The hero embraces the experience of the world exactly as it is and in so doing, she or he steps into their own authority and is whole.
Reading it at a moment when I felt in my “greatest darkness”, I found it hugely encouraging, an important reminder that “this too shall pass”!
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