A few years ago, I went to see a magnificent production of the opera “The Damnation of Faust.” I was fascinated by the music, the voices, and the advanced technologies used in the production.

At some point – halfway an aria – one of the stage curtains got stuck. (Life happens!) In one area of the stage one could see Faust and Mephistopheles singing to each other, while in another area production people were working with the curtain, pulling it down, trying to make it fall into its place. (It was not supposed to be comedy, and yet, we laughed.) To make things worse, dancers and choir were running from one side to the other as they prepared for the next scene. The magic of theater and opera was lost, not because a curtain got stuck, but because light was shining there where darkness was supposed to help prepare the way for us to enter into a new movement in the story.

We are afraid of the dark. We are lost in the dark.

And yet ... it's darkness what brings us to therapy.

I said ... let the dark come upon you...
As, in a theatre.
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away--
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
- T.S. Eliot

Let darkness - the not knowing, the not understanding, the challenges of the present moment, the broken relationships, the stories of the past, the fears of the future - help you prepare for the next stage in your life.

Edgard Danielsen
Licensed Psychoanalyst