Darkness and Light

Ad diem tendo- all of us

(posted early this morning, these memories didn't go out to the full readership so we’re trying once more..)

In a lovely Substack I highly recommend, In the Garden of My Imagination, David Perry talked about his youth and a wonderful room he slept in. A happy memory.

I too had a memorable room but it was not so light.

It was a sleeping room assigned to me when I was young, in the only truly haunted house I've ever experienced. An old house, my grandmother's, haunted not perhaps by restless spirits, but by sad memories of lost loved ones. I was too young to understand, but I could definitely sense them, especially in the small room upstairs at the far dark end of a narrow hallway. A room furthest from the stairs leading to the safety of the first floor. At night it was the worst: I never went up there in the daylight, or anytime voluntarily. The entire floor scared me, but that room worst of all. Perhaps it was cruel to put me there in the darkness, but my father back from battlefields of true terror in Europe, and my mother who grew up in a sunlit home, both had senses dulled to the spirits of this old house, though Father knew well the history of the place, closet and basement, brother and father. Madness and deep, deep sadness. The little room I was assigned had only one occupant before me, my great grandmother and she spent, confined, many tormented nights there, with terrifying things no one else could see. She had some kind of dementia no doubt. Doctors would likely recognize the symptoms of the late stage of the disease. I was the first person to sleep there since she- in the same antique bed, in the same hollow her body had created in the old stuffed mattress, looking up at the same ceiling from where grimacing faces had formerly looked down at her. A room unlit by electric light! A darkness so heavy as to be almost alive. A terrifying place for a little boy. Even now, seventy years later, in the fullness of power, burning with a white fire of Compassion, it would be difficult to enter that very heart of darkness and scour away the ancient pain permeating the walls. But we all must do so sooner or later. We must go into our own places, where children cry in the dark, and bring them out into the light. We must rescue ourselves and others and leave a world where there are no more haunted houses, no more foreboding floors, no more pain-filled rooms. A world, a realm, we Buddhists call

Akaniṣṭha

The final destination and true end of all darkness and sorrow.

It is well within our power. If we don't bring all beings to the light, who will?