Dark Night, Star Bright: My Journey Back to Life

Dark Night Star Bright book on the ground

outside stone awning

open book with exposed poem

Each day brings its own trouble and its own solutions. Life is always bitter, always sweet. It’s the balance that keeps seesawing.  We love and cheer the good times and complain and, hopefully, survive the bad. 

We tend to only think of life from our own narrow perspective and rarely try to keep our eyes and vision looking up and view our lives from above. It’s a difficult thing to do, especially for long periods of difficult life circumstances. 

I know this by experience. 

In 1997, after 12 years of an abusive marriage, I stepped out of the only kind of life and religion I had ever known and on a difficult pilgrimage towards LIFE. 

I knew very little about much of anything back then and had a naive belief that life would be easy. Year after year, I waited for that to manifest. Year after year, life was mostly bitter with just enough sweet to keep me going. 

I actively looked for goodness and I always found it….right in the middle of all that pain. 

On December 3, 2012, I woke up in what I have discovered people call ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever experienced, as I lost hope that life would get better. I had no desire to continue to live. 

I was in that dark place for 3.5 years. I had no idea if I would ever ‘come back’. It changed my life in a multitude of ways. Some I like. Some, I’m not sure I do. Regardless, I chose to stay; I was given the grace to stay. I am grateful, and I know there is a greater purpose and goodness involved in me being right here-right now. 

Three days before I woke up in the dark, I decided to write a poem a day for a year. I remember that day thinking about actually doing that, now that all was darkness, and making the firm decision to continue. At the end of that year, I had written over 1,000 poems. Many of those poems are published in my book, Dark Night, Star Bright. 

I was recently taken back to that day in a step around a corner of a garden….that story will be the first video on upcoming in my new YouTube Channel, The Daily Good w Amy, where we will look for good things on a daily basis and share encouraging thoughts on all good things!