Learning to Live in a Dark and Dangerous World

“Amanda, have you considered the possibility that, for you, the world is a dark and dangerous place?” Mike, a playwright and Shaman, asked me during our first and only session.

I didn’t know what to say. The world IS a dark and dangerous place, I thought.

“The world IS a dark and dangerous place,” I offered. I pulled my hair behind my ear, channeling a bit of my uncertainty.

“So, yes. For you the world is dangerous. Scary.” He looked at me with a gentleness that made me deeply uncomfortable. “What if I told you that you were taught this? What if I told you that instead, you could have been taught that the world is a beautiful place, filled with immeasurable joy?”

I shifted slightly away from his curious gaze, sinking a bit deeper into the large leather chair that was already close to engulfing me. We were sitting in Mike’s screened in office that he’d added on to the side of his modest house. It was where he wrote, where he sometimes spoke to people about spiritual practices, and where he sometimes hid from his wife and their five teenage daughters.

Mike was in his early 50’s, a large man with long graying hair that he wore in a flat ponytail down his back. He wrote plays featuring strong and complex female characters, and I sometimes acted in those plays. A long-time recovering alcoholic, he spoke often and openly to me of his own dark and dangerous 30’s, when he hadn’t been anything close to what he wanted to be as a human, a husband, and a father. He had then sought sobriety, and become a writer.

I was 27 and had just had my second son. Without a traditional fulltime job, I was technically a stay-at-home-mom, but I was never really fully that. Doing three to six theatrical productions a year, plus a number of smaller artistic projects, all of my children were with me on stage in utero, and I was often performing within weeks of their births.

I was here with Mike because I was exhausted by my life, and seeking guidance from the elders I didn’t have. My mom was alive and with me, sure, but she had her own issues to handle and wasn’t handling them very well. My father: A topic of which I never spoke then, and rarely speak now.

And yet, I wanted to believe that my ancestors were there to guide me spiritually, and Mike was here to tell me that they were.

Still, his question caught me off guard. It suggested that we had some amount of control over how we viewed the world in which we live. That rather than a static place with a set number of variables and only one lens through which to view those variables factually, how we looked at what we were seeing mattered almost as much as, or possibly more than, what we were seeing.

That, in fact, what we were seeing was a direct result of how we were seeing it.

And furthermore, the idea that we had been taught to see it this way, via our parents and adult relatives and early life experiences, suggested, to me at least, that we could teach ourselves to see it differently.

Accepting that I had been taught this, though, is much easier to discuss now in my 40’s, with two more sons, and 18 more years of spiritual growth under my belt. Holding my parents responsible for anything at that point in my life felt like betrayal and rejection. I didn’t have the language for it.

“I love my Mom,” I said, frustrated with the desperation that seeped out.

Mike sipped black coffee from a chunky mug made by a local artist, his large hands obscuring most of the cobalt blue swirls that circled it.

“Of course you do. And she loves you. I think it’s possible, and maybe you might too, that she was taught that the world is inherently unsafe. To keep you safe, she taught you that the world can’t be fully explored or fully enjoyed because you have to be so careful.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose tightly. I hadn’t made full eye contact with Mike since we’d sat down half an hour before.

“Maybe when you take a walk today, look around at what you’re seeing. Know that your ancestors are there with you, always. They’re walking with you. It’s okay to stop and enjoy that chipmunk sitting on the fence. Your ancestors are all around you. They’re within you. So when someone smiles at you, you can smile back, and it’s okay. It’s safe. You can enjoy things. They won’t stay where they are, that chipmunk will find another fence, but then you’ll keep walking and a rabbit will take its place.”

He set his mug down. Leaned forward lightly, hands folded.

“You’re safe, Amanda. And you’re never alone.”

Today, 45 years old, my four sons on their way to adulthood, living in the middle of a never-ending cycle of disease and violence and political insanity, with a groaning planet, and the imminent shutdown of theater and music and social connection ever looming, it’s tempting to consider Mike’s words a form of toxic positivity. And out of context, they might be.

But in context, in the form of a way in which we approach our world, those words are, in fact, a key to how we surrender to the joy of a world in which we have no control.

Many years after my conversation with Mike, another beautifully shamanic human would write up my birth chart. Masha sent me a three-page email detailing much of my life, predicting to the year the upheaval that I would have in my late 30’s and early 40’s. She died of breast cancer before I rolled through those unexpected years of divorce and career changes and internal transformations that have once again left me exhausted and seeking guidance. But I hear her voice when I re-read her words: “You will be most solid, most alive, most yourself when you seek spiritual pursuits and higher purpose. The everyday minutia will drag you down, unless you elevate it.”

“The everyday minutia will drag you down, unless you elevate it.”

“You are safe. You are not alone. Your ancestors walk with you.”

Right now, I believe that our world is being driven based on fear, uncertainty, and an unrelenting sense that even the tools that we use to bring us joy in dark times can be removed without notice. Many of our leaders are scarcity minded, rather than community and abundance minded. This mindset has deep implications for our families of origin, our chosen families, our communities, our world.

It makes us feel as if we are walking alone in a world that we can't enjoy.

I will never suggest that we can escape from this darkness with a positive attitude alone; that IS toxic positivity. We require strong leadership, and strong decisions based in abundance and community.

I will say that I still take lots of walks, especially now. And that this past week, when I realized that I’ve once again, through work and financial challenges and too much time reading comments on social media, allowed myself to be dragged down into everyday minutia, viewing the world as dark and dangerous and overwhelming, I see the need to reset.

To slow down, and look around me.

And maybe you’re feeling this heaviness too, the weight of a planet in crisis with millions of souls mired in fear.

When we look around together, I hope that we will see each other. I hope that we will recognize the light as it struggles against the fear that seeks to extinguish it, and see our ancestors walking beside us, enveloping us in their light and their strength, warming us so that we might warm others.

Standing with us as we stand together so that we can see the chipmunk on the fence, and when it moves, not give up, but look for the rabbit that comes after.