Dreamwork Journey

What is a dream? The more I do this work, Archetypal Dreamwork, the less I feel I know. I am starting this writing in this place of not knowing, and it feels both scary and exciting. I have a dream I am working with, and at times it feels like it’s working with me. This is the dream:

I see a young man outside on the street with a machine gun and I am afraid. He comes to the door and puts his arm around a young woman from behind. Her friends are upset and she tells them it’s OK. Then I am with the man, the young woman, and others in a parking lot. A bus comes, up-ends, and falls onto its side. The man crashes a bicycle through the roof of a small car, saying “She’s dead to me.” I think he’s going to kill the young woman and I am terrified.

I woke up from this dream with that familiar feeling of relief that it was “just a dream,” that I was not in danger . . . but I knew better than to write it off like a bad movie I can walk away from. Dreams are not random stories—and neither is my life, although I still lapse into unconsciousness and believe that everything I experience is random and I just have to defend myself against it all until I’m safely out of here.

Waking from this dream, I knew the man with the machine gun is the Animus, the divine figure coming for me, this time in this intense way. Not randomly, but very precisely…to open up my fear so I can feel what lies beneath. Of course, the shoulder his arm is pinning close to him… is mine.

Realizing who the man in this dream is, immediately, I could feel him at my back, pressed against me, his arm diagonally across my front. I could feel him claiming me. It brought me to tears.

Why does he come this way? Because my terror is the way to dropping down to this sorrow. My work is to recognize the terror in my life, in all the tiny moments it wants to project, and to see the bicycle crash through the roof of the car, and then go to him, be claimed.

After days of working the terror piece, something is shifting. The image of the bicycle crashing into the car now brings pain, as if this act were happening to me. I believe it has, and I have not wanted to feel the raw pain mixed with this abject terror. Yet this is the way to him. Only when I can feel am I willing to be claimed, held. All my feelings fill this flesh of his flesh, waking me from such a deadened slumber.

Nothing in a dream is random. This machine gun points at the me who stands separate from him in the dream, who is not the girl in his arms, the me who is “dead to him.”

Claimed, I can come back from the dead. I write this, knowing it is “true”—but there is no true, really, just the shifting feelings that come as I practice standing in this precise moment, his arm across me. As I practice staying and feeling…and trusting this unknowable process.

When Black is White and No is Yes 04/25/2012

My dreams want me to go down, to descend into the dark, into water, into caves. They want me to move toward the things that terrify me. They bring back the traumas I have constructed my life to suppress. They want me everywhere I don’t want to be. I want white and they bring black. I want up and they open the ground beneath my feet. They want my yes, and I respond with no— No, I won’t go in, go down, feel that, see this.

In The Red Book, Carl Jung writes of his descent to find his soul. It is an incredible story in which he wrestles with the constant dichotomy between where he stands and where his soul is standing. At one point his soul speaks to him, says, “Climb down into your depths, sink!” and Jung responds in anger. When his soul then says, “My path is light,” Jung replies, “Do you call light what men call the worst darkness? Do you call day night?”

I can relate. I want to feel happy, and my dreams bring sadness and grief.

I have been struggling with the commitment I made in my last dreamwork session (see my previous post “Paradise Lost”) to acknowledge when I am the cocky woman in my dream who nestles in the cut-down tree and invites me to “have a good life”—and to choose instead the grief of the tree cut down and my teacher who I love. Right or left? White or black? Happy or sad?

No or yes.

I have written before about how difficult it has been to be shown by my dreams all the ways I say no to my soul—all of the thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes that run me when I am not feeling from my depths. All of the ways I say no to God. One of the most powerful is shame.

Since I last wrote, I have seen the cocky woman everywhere in my life—in how I feel in my body when my husband asks me a question, in how I talk to my sons, in how I order a cup of tea, in the thoughts I wake up with, the habits of my day that I cling to. And then comes the shame. How many times this week have I tried to go to the grief and the teacher from this place of shame (Oh shit, I’m her—this is terrible, gotta get right…)

Of course, the shaming voice, and the voice urging me then to feel my devastation, dammit, is her, too.

As long as I have been doing this work, I am still learning that it is not about getting anything right. This KILLS the capable person in me who can do/learn/achieve anything. I can’t achieve this.

When the cocky woman is alive in me, I need to stop, to acknowledge it—here she is. To not let her lead me down the shame road. To say, “I am in my no right now…and this is how it feels.” Ironically, my work is to stay right there, in the no, and feel the energy of this demon force. Here I am, Lord.

Right now I feel my yes rising straight through that no.

Paradise Lost: The Deal With the Devil 04/20/2012

I don’t want to believe in the devil, in evil afoot in this beautiful world. I want us all to get along, to have enough, to share our hearts . . .

At my first dreamwork session with my therapist, I told him I was happily married with two young boys who were doing great, that I had good friends and a good life. I remember saying something like “I could almost live the rest of my life like this…but something feels missing.”

In the years since that first session, my dreams have unveiled piece by piece the lie I was living. Seeing how I have chosen a compensating personality to avoid my feelings—and how that personality works to keep me and those I love from God, pure and simple—has not been an easy pill to swallow. Although I am not alone in choosing such a path, and although I chose it out of ignorance and in distress, I can now admit that this thing living through me and masquerading as a perfectly respectable personality… is evil.

Carl Jung writes in The Red Book about the need to accept the evil in us if we are to descend to the true soul. It seems that only such a radical acknowledgment can free us from it, because if we don’t acknowledge it, we are protecting it. I know I have spend too long doing that.

Here is my recent dream:

I’m a girl around six years old running down white steps in a beautiful Greek island village, to get to a class. At the bottom is a tree I love and I anticipate swinging from its branches as I go by, which I always do. As I get alongside it, the tree falls. I stop running, feeling stunned, not yet understanding what just happened. I see that the tree was cut down and the cut is still warm. I see my teacher and call down to him that it’s still warm. I want this to mean that there’s still life here, that the tree is not dead. A cocky woman comes and says she likes to sit in warm places and nestles into a crook in the tree. I feel torn between being with my teacher and my rising feelings of hurt about the tree . . . and the woman who seems to want to pull me into something.

This is a dream of the choice point, and I made my choice either in this lifetime or another. The tree that I love is cut down and I am so young that I don’t understand how something that is always there, like God himself, can be gone. The pain is descending as I call out to my teacher—“It’s still alive, right?” about to find out that my life has just taken an irreversible turn.

At that moment, the cocky woman comes with an offer: “You don’t have to feel this pain; you can become me—cocky, self-assured, happy, making a warm nest out of death itself. Why feel pain when you can feel this good?”

I chose her. Anyone would have, in the face of utter devastation at this moment of joy and innocence crushed.

So what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong is that my joyful girl heart was replaced by the cocky woman. When this woman meets the world through me, I do not feel innocence or joy. I get something out of it, sure—self-satisfaction, the admiration of others, pride… these are the booby prizes. They don’t hold a candle to my six-year-old feet tripping down white steps in Paradise, heading for the tree of life and my beloved, divine teacher.

This dream shows an event that did happen to me at some point. I lost something incredibly precious, so precious that I couldn’t conceive of the loss of it. And my girl-soul waits for me on the other side of the pain I bartered away in that moment. The pain is the only antidote to the evil I invited in and still indulge, the way an addict does a drug.

This moment my dream brings is an eternal one, though. It lives in me, standing tall like the tree I love. I can return and make a different choice. It has been hard to acknowledge how terrible the cocky woman is to me and those I love, and now that I see her for what she is (which is not me, as it turns out), I can choose to turn to the cut tree, let the devastation finally overtake me…and run to the divine teacher, who has never stopped holding this place for me.

Girl on Fire 04/11/2012

When I was a girl, I loved locking the bathroom door behind me and knowing I was absolutely alone, no siblings or parents to orient myself to. I often looked into the mirror and made wild, outlandish faces, letting off steam. I still feel the urge to do this now (and I sometimes even do)…and I’m starting to understand what this is.

The story of my childhood, which I learned first in my dreams, is that I had no self at all. I lived to take care of my mother and my siblings. Some unnamed terror drove me to smooth things over, help, cajole, be smart and resourceful, impress…all for others. When I was not in the locked bathroom, I was “on duty” in some way, vigilant, on the lookout for what was needed from me. I can only imagine the stress in my little body.

Those moments in front of the mirror locked in the solitude of the bathroom were the only times I let myself express anything. There was no room for anger or wildness in my family—at least that’s what I believed. I walked out of my childhood and into my adult life “on duty”—a sentinel rather than a person.

Last week I had this dream:

I’m with a family with two kids, a red-haired 8-year-old boy and a 5-year-old Indian girl with small breasts. The girl wants milk. She takes off all her clothes and goes up to her mother, who tells her to nurse herself. She pretends to drink from her own breasts in a brazen, goofy way and then runs off to rough-house with her brother. The boy and girl are very rambunctious and noisy. My husband tells them to lie in separate beds and be quiet. Someone says disparagingly that the boy just wants to touch the girl’s breasts. I’m not sure what to make of all this—I like the energy of the kids, but everyone is so negative about them. Then a man is holding both kids on either side of him. Over his head they kiss passionately. This feels right to me.

There she is! There I am! Does this little imp even CARE that her mother won’t nourish her? Does she feel self-conscious of her body, her femaleness, her passion? Does she even hear the voices I indulge every day of my life (don’t be too loud, blame your mother, don’t make them mad, they just want to use you…don’t kiss your brother!)

This is not a dream about incest. These two children are the yin and yang of my soul—the boy/girl me, another picture of my hermaphroditic soul. Of course this feels right—are they not in the arms of the divine father, supporting their conjunctio kiss?

In session my therapist asked if I could feel the juice of this girl in me. In that moment all the frustration of keeping her down rose up; my face clenched. It was my bathroom-mirror face. My therapist pointed out that this girl does not make that face in the dream. It’s the face of my own frustration.

And there’s no getting to her from there. I can’t fight my way out of the ego persona I started construction on probably in toddlerhood. This girl lives separate from all of that…under the devastation of long-held traumas and tamped-down feeling. She lives completely free in me, unencumbered by my story with my mother, my endless choices to make myself safe by living for others.

Working with this dream is challenging. Every moment I can feel the prison on either side of the locked bathroom door. But this girl runs wild through doors and walls, naked, grappling with her beloved brother for the sheer joy of her own body and flowing passion.

I feel this, in spurts. It sometimes rises so spontaneously in me that it takes my breath away. When I am in lock-down mode, though, I can forget completely my body on fire with her.

Here she is. Such a dream. If I never have another…this is enough of a promise.

Talking or Speaking 04/05/2012

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This is the image I need to return to from my dream, before I say anything. The question I need to ask myself in any situation is: Am I talking, or am I speaking? I do both, but only speaking is authentic. Talking for me is like a nervous tic, what I do to defuse the tension of the moment. I have believed that talking is relational, but actually, it’s how I protect myself, isolate from everyone, stay safe inside the animal (see my earlier post Hunkered).

Here is my dream:

A woman gets up to speak at a mic. A small dog—a beagle—jumps on her and they roll around until the dog is lying on her. Now I am the woman and I can feel the heaviness of the dog on my chest—it feels good. The dog now drags the woman (I’m watching again at this point) through dirt and back to the mic. She goes willingly and gets up and speaks. Later, a man tells her what a good job she did. She is covered in dirt and nods, receiving his thanks.

Dogs in dreams are almost always archetypal. They come to help us, often to lead us to an experience of soul, to the archetypes, into the water, into the storm. They come broken to show us our own brokenness, or wild to teach us wildness, or ferocious to show us how intensely God wants us to return…or how scared we are.

In my dream, the dog comes to roll me around, to sit on my chest and drag me through dirt, until I am myself again—not all put together and smart and instructive, but surrendered and covered in dust and dirt—salt of the earth.

The woman who speaks from the dust and dirt is my deepest self. When I am her, I don’t plan my words, or speak to try to fill my emptiness with others’ adulation. I am not polished or self-assured. I speak because something has arisen from deep within and needs to be spoken. Once it is said, it is not mine—it never was. Often, I even forget what I just said.

When I am the pre-dog, pre-dirt woman, I know exactly what I just said—word for bloody word. I talk to stop my anxiety from rising. I ask you all about you, get you talking so I don’t have to be afraid of you, because I learned very early that people like to talk about themselves, and will like you if you ask. I don’t have to reveal anything of myself, then. I am actually in a state of profound isolation while you tell me all about you. I always thought this was what relationship is. I have insights about you, too, advice, words of encouragement…but I don’t really care. I’m just managing my unfelt terror of everyone.

Since having this dream, I am returning to this archetypal beagle. I ask myself—am I at the mic all put together at this moment? Am I thinking, opinionated, counseling (or feeling the pull to any of these)? Do I need the dog to roll me around, wake up my child-self, sit on my chest until I am, finally, still? Do I need to be dragged through the dirt to get some smell off me, or on me? (I’m remembering dogs that roll in the dirt after a bath to get the infernal smell of “product” off them.)

Rolled, sat upon, dragged, roughed up, un-mindified. . .

OK, now…. Speak!

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Pain as Promise (Feeling and Jumping) 03/29/2012

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I have always liked going to funerals. I’ve only admitted this to myself in recent years. I guess what I considered the party line was that, when people die, you’re supposed to wish it never happened. You’re certainly not supposed to look forward to their funerals . . .

What I’ve always liked about funerals is that we seem more real than we do in “regular life.” We cry openly, don’t try to be cheerful, hold each other, seem to get how unimportant so many things are. We wear our love for each other on our sleeves. To me it’s like our real lives leak through for a while—we express ourselves. We let ourselves be sad. Some part of me has always felt the holiness in this.

All my life I have felt a deep sadness at my core that I didn’t understand. I learned really young that people didn’t want to see this—that I should be “happy.” I took this one step further and decided that I was supposed to make other people happy too. Cheering people up and helping them feel safe when they were afraid became my mission—at first in my family and eventually everywhere in my life. I was the consummate older sister, and people loved me for it. It was a good gig . . . I thought.

I was stunned the day my dreamwork therapist explained my behavior something like this: “You caretake everybody so they don’t have to feel their feelings. That way, you don’t have to feel yours either.”

I came into this work to find the spiritual connection I have always been looking for. I never thought it would require giving up just about everything I have ever believed about myself—especially the “good” things. If I’m not the caretaking wise one dispensing advice and comfort, who the hell am I? If God doesn’t want me to “love my neighbor” (on my terms), what does he want?

My dreams come steadily to show me how God sees me, and to release me from the false way I see myself. They have shown me trying to help children who need no help at all—who are free and in God’s care. In these dreams, the children are my soul, but I don’t know it…I’m identified as “the helper.” This “helper” cannot know God’s love; only the children can.

But how do I become these holy children? My dreams show me the terror and pain and trauma that are in me, that I try to cover and avoid with caretaking and pride. They invite me to simply feel these. Simple enough, but deadly to “the helper.” When I am feeling—really deep down in it—a place opens in me that I never in a million years expected. It’s me and God all wrapped up together with my pain, vulnerability, longing, grief, joy, love, fear… it inhabits my body and stops my mind.

My dreams right now invite me to feel and jump.

Dream:

I am at a retreat; I have arrived late and don’t know where my room is. I go to the office and find my key, but a lot of people come and somehow I lose my key. An African woman with a beard starts talking to me. I can’t understand her words, but I know she is telling me a story of devastation, on a scale of whole populations of people wiped out. I can’t understand her, but I can feel her. The devastation she is expressing resonates inside of me. A man comes then and tells me he will help me find my room. We pass some fox kits playing with people and I put out my hand. They seem cute until one bites someone; then they start to look demonic. The man throws some raw meat down for them and we go on to find my room.

This dream is about a capacity building in me to feel people instead of understand them. To do that, I need to feel myself, my own deep feelings. This is what was always missing when I was caretaking people—I wasn’t there. Of course, that was the whole point; I did it to avoid my own feelings. In this dream, once I am feeling my devastation, the Animus, the divine archetype, comes to help me find my room. We pass these fox kits—a picture of my own cute, charming, deceptively benign persona that really covers aggression and anger.

Another dream:

A boy is eating cereal he poured on the table. I ask if he wants a bowl and he says no. Then he runs and jumps onto a long, almost vertical slide (really, it’s a cliff) and goes into water. When he doesn’t surface, I feel scared, then realize the slide is for me. I feel terrified now. I hear the words from The Red Book by Carl Jung: Be who you are not.

This soul boy says no to the caretaker and then shows me the way—down the slide (off the cliff) and into the water, for good, no surfacing.

My work from these dreams is to feel my devastation, and once I can, to jump as the boy into the water. To be who I am not: Feeling. Jumping. Giving up the ghost. Leaving the air-breathing world of thinking and caretaking and entering the water-world of essence and feeling.

And not coming back.

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Anatomy of a Fight 03/24/2012

My husband asks if I can be ready for a walk downtown in 10 minutes. I am on my computer finishing up some work and say yes. I take a few minutes to close things down and then go change my clothes. Wait, I’m hungry . . . so I put some peanut butter on an apple while calling a North of Eden colleague and friend to check in about something. Scott is outside now, waiting. I feel my familiar anxiety, which I should know by now signals projected trauma (he’s mad, something bad is going to happen to me). But I step over it, slip on my shoes, go out.

“I reacted when you weren’t ready in 10 minutes,” he tells me. Still not acknowledging my fear, I think (bad sign…): Oh, OK, he’s acknowledging a reaction, not blaming me…

But I can feel that he’s angry, and being the good dreamwork student that I am, I know this means he has not moved beyond his reaction, is still blaming me. I decide to help him with this. (Another bad sign…I’m still not feeling my own fear, my own projected trauma. Instead HE’s the one with projected trauma and I’m the wise one who can see this.)

I ask if he’s still blaming me…and he is. He tells me he is angry that I kept him waiting, called my friend, etc. I start to defend myself, do some fancy jujitsu move of throwing the blame back at him. How much longer than 10 minutes did he actually wait—2 minutes, 3? (I’m in full lawyer mode now.) He says, “I can feel you’re really dug in here.”

We haven’t been here in a while. This is a very, very familiar place in our relationship, and all of my familiar terror and aggression is up as strong as ever. I’m stunned, actually, at the force of it. We are in a complete standoff, and I can feel hatred coursing through me. We walk awhile in silence.

Finally…I remember to do my dreamwork homework. I go back to the dream from my Esalen retreat of being afraid of the dog. At the retreat, I stepped in to being the dog, which was full of energy and passion…and then took that feeling to the man leaning over to kiss me from another dream (see my earlier post “Descending”).

Walking beside Scott, I go to these dream places. It’s not easy at first, but I start to feel how the terror I’m feeling is not about Scott… I’m afraid of this dog, who is really me. I’m afraid of this passion in me. I feel the passionate dog in me now and I go to the man and fall into myself, feel my love for this divine lover rising, feel the sadness that always accompanies that love.

I tell Scott this as I’m walking. I say: “I am afraid of the dog mouthing my hand. I know I am this dog and I can feel his energy in me. I am taking it to the Animus and feeling my love and sadness rising.” I say this to my husband even as the banshees in my mind scream: “Don’t give him the satisfaction!”

I am doing this for me. As this place of love and pain in me returns, the issue with Scott is gone. I can feel my love for him, too, rising.

Scott asks to sit down on a bench in town. He tells me that he took his last words to me (“You are dug in”) and turned them around (Thank you Sue Scavo and Byron Katie) to see how he was dug in. He can see how my calling my friend brought up his trauma of abandonment. He is dropping into that and bringing it to his own dream homework place as his projection onto me disappears. He is doing his work.

In the time it took to walk downtown (15 minutes), we have come back to each other. There was no need to hash through the details of what happened around leaving, who was wrong, who was right, who was reacting, or how we can keep this from ever happening again. Instead, we needed only to find ourselves again. Returning to the selves our dreams know us to be, we could meet each other.

To me, this is the miracle of this work.

Purgatory 03/16/2012

All my life I’ve been running from something. When I was a girl, I didn’t understand why my parents were so anxious all the time, and just assumed something really scary was hanging over our heads if we didn’t make the school bus, left our wet coats on the floor, or slipped and fell in the creek behind our house while we were playing.

I learned about projected terror in my family, and went on, like most of us, to project my own, everywhere. I never questioned my fear of getting a wrong answer on a test or saying the wrong thing. Of course these things were scary . . . weren’t they? If I failed a test . . . . I never filled in the blank, but if I could have, it would have been something like: If I fail a test, I will be obliterated. My terror is that intense.

What the hell?

I have had many dreams that suggest having experienced terrifying trauma, and I can only assume this happened in another lifetime. Past lives is a controversial subject, but for me, it makes sense. What else would explain the PTSD reactions in so many “normal” people? In me?

At the dreamwork retreat at Esalen recently, this dream of mine was worked in my “strings” (group dream enactment):

A friend has a dog that has black leather all across its back. She says it’s a new dog from the pound—her last dog died and this one is 10 years old. Its last owner kept it pushed up against a radiator and this is what happened to its back. I play a little with the dog and he gets rambunctious and mouthy. I’m scared and stop playing.

When we worked this dream I first played myself, afraid of the rambunctious dog, and then played the dog, experiencing the energy and excitement (I wrote about this in my previous post “Descending”). There was another moment that struck me, though. Marc, who was leading the strings, made a comment about how I live my life pressed up against the radiator, reliving over and over some old, past trauma. The dog, clearly, has moved past it and despite its terrible wound, is ready to play. Have I?

Living my life pressed against a radiator is a visceral image I can’t shake. My God, that’s what it feels like! Every time I project my terror into the world (worry about money, doing the right thing, saying the right thing), I am pressing my own back against the radiator of some long-ago trauma that is not happening anymore. This projection keeps the trauma cycle going—to avoid my terror, I will put it “out there” and try to be better, make more money, be a kinder wife, work harder. And all the while I am getting burned over and over.

The teaching of this dog dream is that the burning is done, and it’s time to play (and love and need and live, Goddamn it!). I was terrorized once, and I shut down, determined never to feel it again. I chose to project it outward where I can live in the illusion that I can do something about it, be better. That is Purgatory, the radiator again and again, because it will never be over. The next “terrifying” thing will always come, which breeds the anxiety that never ends.

I am in Purgatory in this dream, pulling my hand back from the playful dog—another projection of an old trauma, the trauma relived, my back against the radiator. The way out is the dog himself---wounded, for sure, but moving on, with his new owner…a puppy again at 10.

Could this be me?

Descending: My Gift from Esalen 03/14/2012

I am walking down stone steps side by side with a man who has his arm around my shoulders. We are walking into the darkness together.

This is the dream I brought back from the dreamwork retreat at Esalen, in California. The man is the divine male archetype, the Animus, and he is taking me down further into the mystery, the unconscious, my personal journey to reclaim what I have lost. His presence, my salve.

This dream came the night after my dreams were enacted in the group on the first night of the retreat. In one dream, I am a young woman feeling socially awkward at a gathering—the way I did feel when I was young, and still do. A man leans over me, talking, and I feel confused, not sure how to respond, not even sure I like what’s happening. When he kisses me, I don’t kiss him back…I’m way outside of myself and I have no idea what I want. He leaves.

In another dream, a friend has a new dog with a back so scarred it is like black leather. I’m told his former owner kept him pushed up against a radiator, causing this scar. When I try to play with the dog, he gets really excited and starts to mouth my hand. I feel scared and pull back. Writing this dream right now, it feels like the same as the one with the man—in both, I am pulling back.

In the enactment at the retreat, I played myself being afraid of the dog, and then switched to play the dog in his excited state. I was surprised at how quickly my energy shifted. As the dog, I was filled with excitement…it raced through my body like a wildfire. I felt like I could explode, kept clenching and unclenching my fists and moving my feet. In this state I went back to the dream of the man leaning over me.

In the enactment process we call String Therapy (for the strings sometimes used to show relationships between dream elements), this is called a splice—bringing one dream moment to another. Sometimes it brings new understanding of the pieces; sometimes it ignites the psyche in startling ways. When I went with the dog energy to the man, it felt like a trap door opened and I went down. Instantly, I was crying as waves of desire pulsed through my body. I felt the pain in it, of how long I have squelched this burning need. I felt the love of the man, but most powerful was the feeling of my own love for him.

The next night, I dreamed of the Animus three times: walking with him down the stone steps, throwing myself into his arms, and wrapping myself around him as we sank into a substance thicker than water (blood?).

What shifted, from pulling back from both man and dog, to being so intimately with the man? What was the alchemical element that helped me shift? In my “strings,” when I was the scarred dog I had been afraid of, I slipped under the projected fear to feel what that fear covers—intense passion and libido, which I bring to my Beloved to feel who I really am . . . the one who does know exactly what she wants.

I will forget and be in that awkward, anxious way again. I will pull back, afraid to be burned again. But I have lain beneath him and felt myself ignited, physically, in this life, this world, this body…my cells remembered Him. I am remembering, as I descend into the waiting darkness with Him.