Kicking and Screaming into the Dark Night of the Soul

Sometimes life sends you lessons you can't ignore.

Or if you do ignore them, they intensify until they bring you to your knees. 

That's my world these days. I'd like to say I've learned the lessons well, but I'm spending a lot of time on my knees lately.

Life wants me to stand up for myself. I just want things to be harmonious.

But there is no harmony where there is discord. No harmony where there is contention. No harmony where there is disproportion.

Conflict makes me cringe. It swallows my joy and my lightness.

Drags me kicking and screaming into the dark night of the soul, where I find my courage and strength and clarity.



The kind of clarity that allows my anxiety to lessen and my deep, inner calm to reassert itself. 

It likes to run and hide when I'm on my knees.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.

Photo: 2014 Katherine Cartwright

The Magic of Ordinary Things

The night I took this photograph I was standing on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore watching the full moon rise. A woman stood next to me, taking pictures with the exact same iPhone. But the images we captured were very different. Hers was as we saw it there in the night sky; mine was as you see in the photograph below. There was light shining on the waters in both, but the light reflected from the perfect sphere in the sky was very different.

It makes me wonder.

It really makes me wonder.

I have a similar experience photographing the sky in the daytime when I am out in nature in an expanded state of consciousness. I've got a picture from a trip to New Mexico on a glorious day up in the Enchanted Circle near Taos. The sun looks like a radiant being shining blessings from above. I have other photographs in which you can see the reach of the sun's rays into the canopy of the forest. 

There may be a scientific explanation for these kinds of things, but I prefer to be in Mystery. I wrote a poem about that once. It remembers an experience I had with a friend. We were looking at the same thing but seeing something different. We were presented with something that seemed impossible. We could both see it. At first. Something changed when she tried to figure it out and came up with the answer, but she also lost something in the process. She decided in the end that she liked my magic better than her science.

The experience has always stayed with me. As have her words. 

How we see is as important as what we see. 

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.  

Photo (c) 2015 Katherine Cartwright

Beauty in the Night

It's hard to believe that only a month ago I returned from my time in the desert.

The days and weeks have seemed to slip away and I wonder where the time has gone. 

The light, too, is slipping away, as each day seems to diminish and move toward a longer night and deepening darkness. It's the time of year that we go deep within and hibernate. It's part of the natural cycles. And it feels quite at odds with the striving of the the world around us.

But there is beauty in the night. 

I've included a stunning photo from a friend, Daniel Cain, with this blog post. He's someone who spends his days and nights moving through the desert and taking amazing photographs of the experience and the natural wonders he discovers there. Lately, he's been capturing images of the night and the night sky. 

They've got me thinking again about the beauty that can be found in darkness and the tiny illuminations we discover along the way.

Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year - I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days. 


Photo: Daniel Cain, November 2018 - Ocotillo group grow in Palm Canyon under the night sky in Anza-Borrego Desert Park. 

In the Wilds Hunting Stories

Two days later and I am back in the badlands.

Watching the late afternoon light bounce off stone and create unimaginable color. The Salton Sea, off in the distance to the east, is robins egg blue. The mountains beyond glow with all the shades of pink.

I've come to watch the sunset and am hoping for wild color in the evening sky. It's a different landscape from the other day with its dust storms. There's a light breeze and the light is making everything glow. Of all the places here that are easy to get to, these badlands might be my favorite. 

The stone tells its stories, revealing layers and layers of history, all the way back to the dinosaurs.

As I sit here watching the sun go down, I wonder whether I'll be back this way again. 

The mountains behind me are now blue shadow. Soon, the sun will drop behind the mountains, but sunset is still about a half hour away. My life feels wholly my own when I am here. I am wild and free. A woman hunting stories to bring home and tell.

The late afternoon sun teases shadow from the badlands. Reveals texture and glow. The changing light bares features of the landscape that would otherwise remain hidden. 

It's hard to know which way to look. I want to miss nothing. 

The sun is now a mere echo of radiance behind the mountains. The eastern sky is pink and lavender. Light and color paint the mountains. The panorama blushes and the air feels colder. If it was a week later, I'd be watching the full moon rise. 

The moon appears suddenly. A first quarter moon high in the sky.

There's no light shining on the badlands now. The features I saw before have receded once again into obscurity. The sedimentary rock closest to me looks as if the earth is folded here. It's getting cold and I need to get my coat from the car. Everything has softened to an impressionistic painting. If I was not in the desert I would think I see mist rising in the distance. I don't have words to do it justice, to paint the landscape.

The pink and the lavender skies over the Salton Sea have risen higher and a bright blue is beneath it. The sea now is pink and lavender, and the mountains a dull periwinkle. The glow over the southwestern mountains is a fuzzy apricot. I imagine that my red jeep seems out of place here but, as I turn to look, it melts beautifully into the dusty lavender brown stone behind it.

The sun has now set. I think of it melting into the Pacific Ocean as the lights come up in the beach towns. There are no lights here in the badlands. I want to wait for stars but it feels like it's time to go. 

I leave the badlands to the moon and the crying coyote.

Into the Beams is an approximately 40 day wilderness writing journey during the 2018 Venus Retrograde period. There is no agenda other than to show up and see what treasures are buried there.

Photo (c) 2015 Katherine Cartwright. View over the Borrego Badlands in Anza-Borrego Desert Park in the late afternoon just before sunset. 

To Capture and Share

I'm in the Borrego Badlands on a day so windy it brings up dust storms. 

The dust and wind dance together and seem to be alive in their fusion. I look across the wide expanse of the badlands and my view is obscured by clouds of rising dust, grit, and sand. The mountains seem once again softened by mist and cloud. Off in the distance, the Salton Sea is barely discernible from the surrounding landscape and the mountains beyond are completely eclipsed by the dust storm.

 I'd come seeking clear skies.

The paper of my journal is covered in grit. And the pen seems hesitant to move across the page. The wind is wild.

I find myself longing for a different landscape, but there's beauty here as well. It's stark and seems sterile, and It's so dry - even with the recent rainfall. There's barely any green on the desert plants. The ocotillo are bony hands with eerily moving fingers in the wind. 

I hear a raven calling and the voices in the dust. 

The usual color in the badlands is absent today, even though the light is lovely and strong.

A sign somewhere speaks about the good in the badlands. 

"...describes land of no apparent use to humans. Vast and eroded, void of topsoil and vegetation - can't be farmed or ranched. Sedimentary rocks - layers rich with natural history. Fossils locked in rock preserve the stories of animals and plants that once thrived here. When the light is right, the badlands glow with vibrant color. Erosion has created fantastic shapes and patterns that become a challenge to capture and share."

Into the Beams is a 40 day wilderness writing journey during the 2018 Venus Retrograde period. There is no agenda other than to show up and discover the treasures buried there.


Photo (c) 2015 Katherine Cartwright. View of sedimentary rock in the Borrego Badlands, Anza-Borrego Desert Park. 

Dust Storm

I stood on the mesa and watched the wind lift the desert floor and dance.

It took two weeks of reflection to come to this interpretation. To see my experience differently. Were you to peer into my journaling of that day, you would read about stark and sterile landscape, about dust and grit and sand. 

I certainly recognized the beauty. How could I not? But the recognition may have been fleeting in the face of overwhelming challenge.

The challenge that day was to find a place to stand where I could breathe the air.

The next day, I developed an illness that flattened me on an afternoon I'd intended to take a long hike deep into the desert. Instead, I found myself reclining in an antigrav chair with my hat over my face, neck, and chest all afternoon soaking in sunbeams and softer winds. 

Occasionally looking at the sweeping views of mountains. 

Listening to horses chuff. And to whistling winds.

Resting into the silence that surrounded all that. 

A different kind of wilderness descent.

Into the Beams is an approximately 40 day wilderness writing journey during the 2018 Venus retrograde period. There is no agenda other than to show up and discover the treasure buried there.

Photo (c) 2015 Katherine Cartwright. View of Anza-Borrego Badlands toward the east and Salton Sea. Moonrise, a Hunters Moon.