“There are dark days ahead.”

Yes.  The darkest.

You will not be able to light enough candles to push away the encroaching of this night. The dark has its own heavy weight. There is a night sky obscured by impenetrable clouds.  The stars are as impossible to imagine as if they did not exist.

But they are there, lover. They are always there.  Shining and exploding and fragmenting into pieces too far away to see. The light travels moves toward us over countless miles, and even in their eventual darkness, they travel toward us still.

Millions of meteors burn, every day, as they enter the atmosphere. Incinerate and turn to dust.  Disintegrate into the finest particles. So that every time you breathe you are inhaling the universe.

Right now, this very moment, your lungs are filled with stardust.

So keep breathing in the stars every time you sing. Stretch in asana and exhale divinity. Know that you are made of this universe and this universe was made for you. The very atoms that have made you whole are formed from stardust. Your light? It’s inborn. Been in you since the beginning before the beginning. Will still be here in the end after the end.

It’s still going to get dark sometimes. The cycle between darkness and light is predictable and necessary and true. We must go deep and explore the murky shadows. We must travel down and dig our fingers into into the earth and discover the root of things. We must dance in the underworld. And we must  – and we will and we do – eventually rise again.

But we need to remember, when the shadows lengthen and the nights grow ever longer, that we bring our own light into the darkness. That even when it burns out a star is still a star.   And you are still you. And your light is as true and as necessary and as ever present as the North Star that still guides the sailors home.

So do me a favor, love. Know this. No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.

The incandescence is you.