On Darkness as Origin

There are nights in West Cork when the land feels stripped back to its rawest truth. Down on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, that long and narrow reach of earth running out into the Atlantic on the south side of Bantry Bay, winter arrives without softenings or shelter. No hedgerows here. No gentle boundaries. Just long golden mountain grasses blown flat by Atlantic wind, heather and gorse crouched low as if bracing itself, and the ground beneath holding its shape in stone and silence. The shells of old stone cottages cling to rocky ledges, standing like ribs on the hillside, reminders that not many lived here, and those who did lived thinly, without softness. Even the trees grow out of rocks, gnarled and leaning as though enduring more than thriving, shaped by a weather that asks everything and gives little back.

It is a landscape that pares you to essentials. Imagination quiets. Story falls away. All that is left is salt air, rock, wind and the knowledge that whatever survives here has done so through resilience, not ease.

Underfoot, famine furrows run through the winter grass, the ridges of An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger of the 1840s. Soil turned and turned for food that did not come. The land remembers. It carries history not as tragedy alone but as a bone-deep testament to endurance. You pass those ridges and breath steadies. Humility rises. The human world suddenly looks small beside a hunger etched into earth.

And then, at the last outpost where land yields to cliff and sea, you look up.

The Milky Way lies across the sky like a pale seam in dark cloth; grainy, luminous, alive. The night is whole. No electric hum. No restless interference. Just darkness deep enough to hold wonder without ceremony. Here the body settles as if it has found its original pace. You are not diminished by the sky’s expanse: you are placed within it, one life on old stone beneath ancient light. Nothing is performing. Nothing needs to. Darkness is not absence. It is density, worth, origin.

A few evenings later in the Alps, winter again, but different. Outside, vast mountains stood in hard winter profile, sharp against the dark. Snow held moonlight like breath held in the chest. Stars were scattered there too, familiar and steady, yet through them moved the faint pulse of modern sky traffic: satellites crossing, aircraft lights blinking, quietly insistent.

Not intrusion. Not loss. Simply a noticing.

The night no longer belongs solely to silence. The modern world has followed us upward, not as conqueror but as companion we did not necessarily invite.

And as I watched those lights move across the night in the Alps, another awareness rose, not anxious but honest. There is a quiet violence in a sky that cannot rest. Those small blinking signals are more than metal and function; they are the pulse of a culture that does not know how to stop. Productivity has climbed beyond the factory floor and into the firmament. Even the heavens carry the hum of “more, now, again.” What once offered us a well of unbroken darkness, a place where the nervous system could sense the cessation of effort, now bears traces of human restlessness. The eye, hungry for star and stillness, is drawn instead to movement and machinery. And beneath that visual tug lies a subtler truth: when the night sky is busy, the body’s instinct to yield and soften must work harder. Rest becomes an act of devotion rather than inheritance.

And in that noticing, a thought surfaced softly. The land I come from remembers a hunger of the body, fields scored with furrows where hope was rowed into soil and harvest did not come. That hunger lived in the stomach, in the muscle, in the thin faces of people who stayed rooted even as life withdrew. Our hunger today is not hollow cheeks and failed crops. It is a hunger of a different organ, the psyche starved of presence, the soul underfed by contact that never drops below the surface. We are surrounded by 'connection devices', and yet many move through the world as if orphaned from themselves, from each other, from the living earth. It is a famine not of bread but of being. A slow thinning of attention, intimacy, reverence, the kind of nourishment once taken for granted in the rhythm of land and night. The body can only go so long without food; the spirit too has limits. And perhaps this is why the blinking lights overhead felt, for a moment, like a quiet sorrow, not for what has been lost but for what we forget we are already losing.

Yet winter, in its old wisdom, remains patient. It asks nothing extravagant, only that we remember how to be creatures again, not signals in motion.

Winter is the first teacher of interior life. It draws everything inward, sap sinking into root, breath into belly, thought into depth. In our tradition, the dark is not the end but the beginning. Night precedes day. Winter precedes spring. At Samhain, the old cycle dissolves even as the new one begins, life continuing through death, not beyond it. Darkness is the soil of becoming.

This descent is not collapse. It is coherence. It is the body remembering earth’s pace. It is the psyche finding its depth again, away from brightness and display. Life in winter does not vanish. It withdraws. It concentrates. Roots thicken beneath frost. Stones stay silent. What must survive grows sinew, not surface.

So how do we enter that necessary darkness when even the sky carries movement and signal? We choose it, not dramatically but faithfully. We allow night to be night within us, even if it must be protected now.

Winter is not darkness as blankness or absence. It is darkness as origin, a place of rest and slow making, a chamber where we do not need to shine, where new life takes form before it has name or direction. To honour winter is not to retreat from the world but to refuse the demand to remain constantly visible. It is to trust that unseen growth is real growth, that what gathers in silence gains strength, that not every part of us belongs to the lit realm.

Even if the sky is no longer wholly untouched, let it teach you still. Let it invite you inward. Let the dark gather you the way soil gathers seed, not to bury but to prepare.

May you soften into winter as land does.

May your breath settle low and steady.

May you keep one room inside you unlit – a place where you can set down your brightness and rest as seeds rest, held in the dark until the time is right to rise.

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This reflection comes from my Winter / Earth Element 2025 newsletter.

If you'd like to read more of the work that grows through the seasons, the newsletter is where I share the longer pieces. It holds my longer, original writings on Irish cosmology, the old seasonal calendar, archetypal understanding, story and folklore, land-based practice, and the skills and rhythms that have shaped life here for generations.

It is sent to a quiet and dedicated community – for those who prefer substance over noise, and depth over distraction.

You are warmly invited to join here.

© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

Photograph of the Milky Way as seen from the Sheeps Head, by Gavin Sheehan.

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For those who would like to journey the inner night sky this winter, you might like to take a look at one of the offerings currently available via my Online Hedge School:

Constellations of Being: Mapping the Inner Firmament™

– A mythopoetic journey through ancestral memory, night vision, and the sky within.

There are maps we can fold and keep in our pockets – drawn with edges and lines and careful naming. And then there are the other maps. The ones that live in the body, in dreams, in ancestral murmurs, and in the night sky. These cannot be folded. They must be walked. Dreamed. Spoken aloud. Lit from within.

Constellations of Being is such a map. A mapping not of the external cosmos, but of the inner firmament – the sky that lives inside the soul. This body of work arose in the lunar months, when the light wanes and the hours of night stretch long enough for memory, vision, and story to rise. It belongs to the darker half of the year, when the eyes turn upward, and the heart turns inward.

This work is not a course in astrology. Nor is it a spiritual ladder to somewhere else. It is an invitation to meet yourself in the mirror of the stars and to walk the arc of your own mythic becoming – rooted, grounded, and utterly human. Through Irish myth, folk astronomy, ritual, herbal wisdom, and reflective practice, we will trace the soul's constellations: those patterns that hold, shape, and call us.

It is not necessary to understand the sky in order to enter it. But it is necessary to listen.

May this work offer a lantern as you do.