As I consider the recent events in the country, I am reminded of my own “Dark Night of the Soul”. I had separated from my wife, the band I was in was breaking up, I was having a lot of problems with a painful back, my old beater car was barely running, and I had no real source of income. I was staying with a musician friend, sleeping on a piece of foam in his basement. Things looked pretty grim.

I sat in my car at the local park listening to some guy on the radio talking about making things better in your life by trying to “fake it till you make it”. I chuckled to myself in irony, because pretending to be something I wasn’t seemed to be a big denial of my very “real” situation. Wasn’t it hypocritical to pretend to be successful and happy when I was destitute and depressed?

I kept mulling that over as I began a walk in the park. It was a typical cloudy day in the Pacific Northwest, and even the park itself seemed depressed. I plopped down on a park bench, looking down at some ants crawling on my shoes, when suddenly a dapper-looking older gentleman suddenly appeared, saying, “Mind if I join you?”

“I guess,” I replied, and continued my ant survey. “You seem a bit down,” he said. “Yeah, things are far from perfect. Someone said I should ‘fake it till I make it’, and I’m having a problem with that,” I confessed.

The man looked up to the sky and chuckled. “I suppose you think it’s hypocritical to pretend to feel good about bad circumstances,” he winked. I nodded.

“Here’s a better one. How about, ‘Be it to see it’.” He smiled broadly, and nodded back at me the way I had nodded at him. “Life reflects back to you the way you’re feeling towards it, you know.” He suddenly looked at his watch. “Well, enjoy your day,” and promptly stood up and walked off. I wanted to scoff at him, but the twinkle in his eye had thrown me.

It was starting to get dark, so I headed back to my car, aware now of how depressed and sarcastic I’d been being about everything. I was definitely feeling the victim–a real study in “woe is me”, and observing that in myself was enough to snap me out of my funk somewhat. I started to feel a little different about my circumstances–that maybe things didn’t have to be so bad.

The next day I got a call from a woman offering me a job setting up a website for her business. She had heard I was having a hard time, and even set up a room for me to rent from a friend of hers. Things were turning around for me, and that showed me the power of changing my feelings about how I was being. Light at the end of a very long tunnel began showing through.

The woman who hired me ended up becoming my significant other, and the website I designed for her business became Pure Energy Rx.

Since then, I’ve made it a priority to spot and release feelings of discouragement, hopelessness and doubt. These are the feelings that can take us into darkness and distress. All of these negative emotions arise from fear. They arise from the kind of fear that seems to force us to imagine the worst-case scenarios–the “what ifs” that seem so possible, even circling around when things are going good.

I’ve come to believe that these thoughts and feelings are at the core of all problems we see in society. It’s a matter of a belief that we are somehow not “good enough” for good things to happen to us. There is a deep skepticism about how lovable we really are. And when we buy into that lie is when things go sideways for us.

There’s a term I like that helps me when things get dark, and that’s “jubilee”. It originated from religious beliefs in various cultures about a celebration of a future time of happiness and abundance, and by feeling that jubilee helps to bring it about.

Life is a becoming. It is a journey from dark to light. Even when it seems to be going from light to dark, at some point, it all turns around to become dark to light. By allowing the jubilee of light to shine on dark events, we are claiming to the universe that we want love to define life.

As vessels of love, we celebrate our being, and celebrate the being of our loved ones and all of humanity. We KNOW that those of us lost in depression and despair, will find the light, and that certainty just might tip the scales for those living in darkness.