Rooted by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

Author:Lyanda Lynn Haupt [LYNN HAUPT, LYANDA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Only in silence the word,

Only in dark the light,

Only in dying life

Bright the hawk’s flight

On an empty sky.

The Sheltering Darkness

I’d never realized how ingrained this symbolism was in my own psyche until I resolved to compose this entire book without using it. I’ve caught myself unwittingly plopping it in a line over and over again, then crossing it out.

It is a powerful metaphor. All of us have felt the serenity of sunlight upon our face at just the right moment, bringing warmth, healing, comfort. All of us have felt the relief of sunrise after a long night of restlessness or insomnia. All of us have found mercy in a new day, offering much-needed renewal. And yet all of these things can be embraced without banishing darkness as antithetical to the good in our modern cultural mythology.

The trees and all plants are our great mentors in this, growing, always, in two directions at once. Hildegard of Bingen grounded both her ecospirituality and her herbal medicine in this knowing. Her central concept of viriditas, or divine “greenness,” sanctifies more than the literally green mosses and leaves; over and over Hildegard calls upon the interdependence of trees, seeds, spirit, and soil as sacred cocreators. She used various trees in her practical cures, but they were also stand-ins for the mythic tree of life in her writings and visions. In one of Hildegard’s greatest hymns, she sings to the trees on her lush Rhineland. “O happy roots, mediatrix, and branches…” The “happy” roots, ever underland, grow in the particular favor of the divine (and perhaps of Hildegard herself—there is speculation that some of her visions may have been enhanced by the hallucinogenic mandrake root, which she prescribed as a cure for depression). Green branching is only and always mirrored in rooted darkness—the place we, too, come from and return to. To be whole on earth is to embrace this exuberant darkness, the landscape we visit with every turn of day into night.

Darkness possesses its own essential grace. It is darkness that bears liminal imaginings more difficult to access in the scattered daylight. Darkness brings the restorative sleep and dreaming our bodies and psyches require. Darkness takes the harried busyness of the day and transforms it to stillness, to quiet. Darkness brings us starlight. Darkness erases our view of the horizon, forcing our reliance upon a spacious inner vision that daylight cannot provide. Darkness offers a complex refuge for all beings and all aspects of being. As John O’Donohue puts it, “Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of dark.”

Darkness twins with light as the primordial ground of existence. So many myths (Gilgamesh, Orpheus, Persephone, Aeneas, Dante) deploy the Greek journey of katabasis—descent into a dark underworld that will edify a heroic seeker’s eventual life after they return to the aboveground world. Yet for the majority of organisms on earth there is no “return” to light; fullness of being is found in darkness itself.

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