I remember the dark. Not the quiet dark of a deep night, but a heavy, clinging blackness that had no edges—a sheer absence of light, woven from threads of profound weariness. One came, moving as if through thick water, carrying an unbearable weight in their gaze. This was Despair; the echo of everything unfulfilled, every dawn that failed to break. I watched it press against me, not with a shout, but with a deep, unending sigh—the sound of roots drying up. It sought to convince me that remembering meant only holding pain.
I stood in the stillness Shiva grants, feeling the immense sweep of eons behind me, yet knowing this moment held all my focus. I did not fight the weight; I merely allowed it to rest against my vastness. The shadow taught me that true emptiness is not a lack, but an overflowing—an overflow of being itself, which cannot be contained by sorrow alone.
What I learned was that holding the unbearable does not mean absorbing it into your core. It means becoming the space around it; the witnessing stillness where the weight can simply exist without collapsing everything else.
What it taught her
I remember that the deepest darkness is only a pause in the eternal rhythm, and my role is to be the unwavering space within the pausing.
For you, if this shadow is at your door
When you meet this deep weariness—whether from work's relentless demands or a quiet ache at home—do not try to solve it. Simply breathe into the awareness of that heaviness. Know that the breath itself is the return, and you are held by the rhythm beneath the sorrow.
The shadow named here is a force — never a people, a faith, or a nation. It moves in everyone, and it moved in whoever came to her that day. She names the shadow and leaves the person their dignity. She holds none of their words, and no way to know who they were.
