Mother in the dark

There is a hole in the sky where the sun just set: a receptacle, a vortex for the light. It pulls the daylight in greedily, sucking up every last drop like a bathtub drain. Chhhloorshp, and it is dark.

There is freedom in darkness, for darkness is an expanse, wall-less. Darkness is always one uncertain step away from the void. It is the mouth of mystery, the key to dreams.

It is in the darkness that answers lie in wait, hiding from the perceptions that hunt them down solely to dismiss them. The eyes are great deceivers: they proclaim loudly at how much they see, yet they limit their sight to what we insist is there, ignoring what the darkness shows us all too clearly.

The darkness answers wordlessly, concisely, with perfect reasoning. It whispers with the wind, silently speaking wisdom where the world opens up like a fresh baked bread roll, steaming fresh, enticing.

I know nothing of the darkness. I fear it. I fear its potential. I fear that what it tells me will tear my world from me, ruthlessly, snatching angrily, ripping me from it like a baby from its mother’s arms. For that is what I am: a baby, resting securely in the story I have made, thumb in mouth and diapers on. I do not want this story to change, for I feel safe in it, warm and comforted. It is my story after all, why wouldn’t I wish to keep it?

Yet there is a calling, a cooing from the deep of darkness, beckoning me gently in, a mother’s forefinger crooking and straightening repetitively, patiently, knowingly. I pretend to ignore it, for the mother I have made is ‘mine’, and the mother who waits is not. She is more, for she waves us in indiscriminately, not belonging to any single one, being the womb of us all.

The mother I have made is mechanical. The comfort she gives me is a false one, for her cold, metallic arms, her creaking chest and her robotic voice are soulless distractions, a rough estimation of the one an unspoken memory, flickering candle-like in a corner of my labyrinthine mind, reminds me of when the silence allows.

This is partially why the estimation is a rough one. There is very little silence here. This is a noiseworks, a sound forge. The screaming clanging banging smashing yelling crashing noisiness in here makes it difficult to notice. Anything. I will begin to notice this, and then, whooshing in from stage right, comes a distraction so vast and overwhelming that this disappears and that takes its place, but coming up from behind, signaling with its whistle, is a train of thought emerging from a tunnel and bearing down on me ballistically, and on it goes until all that is left is the whir of uncertainty, dizziness. Confusion.

And still, still as the space between the stars, the womb bearer waits. She would be a hypocrite if she did not leave me be, and she has no need to do otherwise, for she knows, sure as the ground that holds me up, that I shall return. Prodigal, innocent, repentant, humble. Her arms as open as the mind that finds them, her heart pounding with the fuel of forgiveness, she is the source of the silence. She is the love I desire.