Welcome to a New Year. Physically speaking, January is the dark time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. It is a time when one can look into the dark, to know it, to find a way through it and in doing so to discover that is hidden inside. You may find your energy, your sense of purpose, your courage. You may celebrate the effort. From that, you will celebrate yourself.
Martin Luther King did just that. He was born this month, January 15th, in 1929. He walked a long dark way and helped many to freedom and a higher sense of self. He found a purpose traveling through the darkness of segregation. He found help in the light he found on the other side, in the idea, in the dream of change made possible, through the courage one can find by surviving the dark. He advanced a dream.
The dark can be found in everyone and anywhere. It is both outside in a night without moon or stars and inside a room with no light. It is in us. It lives in our memories, in our childhood nightmares, in our collective minds and in our broken hearts. It grows or shrinks, depending on who we are, where we live, who we live with, when we live and certainly how we live.
There are some of us who are courageous enough or desperate enough or lucky enough to reach into it and find a path out to it. And there are some who are desirous enough to edge our way through it and by doing so to clear away its hold on us.
It holds us as fear does and as pain - unexpressed - does. It hold us because someone or something brings it to us or we find it on our own. Some, unknowingly, seek it out or want to lay down in it. Some want to disappear.
The young people I work with today were often born into it. We often hear children say they are “afraid of the dark.” They tend to want to sleep with the light on. They struggle to keep the dark away. They are afraid. But really deep inside, they are grieving. Some are even physically damaged. Others are emotionally and mentally damaged. These young people want light. Really they want new parents. They want any parents. They want teachers. They want a home. They want to be able to think clearly, to trust, to be held, to dare, to hope.
A fifteen year old girl I work with was born addicted to cocaine, with a club foot and high anxiety. Through our work, she can just begin to feel her way through her own harmed body and mind because she can imagine a path through the dark. One that takes her into poems and stories. She loses herself in images she transforms into words. In that imagined realm, she walks a bridge over her own dark pain and fear. She reaches down and pulls stories out. She follows her written achievement. She celebrates her dream of publishing a book. She feels empowered. She hopes.
A young man I know draws or paints the images he finds in the dark places inside his mind. He feels stronger. He learns he does not have to be a victim of his dark past, of his nightmares, of his memories. He can transform them on a page, on a canvas. He wants to paint murals so others can see how he walked through the death of his father and the imprisonment of his mother, toward himself, toward who he can be.
Another girl I work with, who has no home, cries as she tells her story. She transforms who she is and who she has been into a dream because that is the only way she can survive through the pain. She has a dream of being an immigration lawyer to help people like her father, who was unfairly deported and forced to leave his family without income. She misses her father. Life is dark, it is frightening. Her mother and siblings are all frightened. Through it all, she feels energized, thinking of how she can change her life and the world by studying hard. She is indeed a high achiever. She will graduate this year, and she plans to go on to college.
All of these young people struggle with darkness. They have courage. They develop faith in their struggle. They use their own selves, their souls, their force. They survive. They have a dream. So, remember to always dream, and always start with a dream. That is what Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous words reminds us of – “I have a dream.”
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