Rituals in honor of Hekate involved unusual dinners given in her honor, where food scraps were given away to beggars and dogs prowled and nibbled. Every deity has its sacred food, its way of uniting spirit and devotee. Somehow in your dark nights you could incorporate, in a dark kind of communion, some of Hekate’s negativity. You could acknowledge

Photography is a contemporary art form that has an extraordinary capacity to reveal the hidden soul. In a photograph you see things that pass by unnoticed in the flow of life. As you look closely at the images, fragments of stories come to mind—the past interrupts the present and is always the bearer of soul. You see the arc of your life, and for a

The many Sufi stories about the mullah Nasrudin teach the importance of wit. Among my favorites: Nasrudin goes to a music teacher to take guitar lessons. “That will be ten dollars for the first lesson, and five dollars for each lesson after that,” says the teacher. “Fine,” says Nasrudin, “I’ll start with lesson two.”

In your dark night you may learn a secret hidden from modern people generally: the truth of things can only be expressed aesthetically—in story, picture, film, dance, music. Only when ideas are poetic do they reach the depths and express the reality. In his highly original essay “The Poet,”6 Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the poet “stands one step

A photograph is a liminal space, neither real nor imaginary, a middle region where the soul comes to life. To the literal mind, a photograph may look like a record of the past, but to the poetic mind it is an uncanny presencing of self and world that is pure, deep, and revealing.

American speech is often plain and pragmatic. You probably use clichés to describe original and deeply felt experiences. An alternative is to discover the power of strong, descriptive words. You could also experiment with different forms, until you find the style that best allows you to say what you feel. Could you create an original letter form,

It’s easy to talk about renewal and change, but profound shifts in the condition of your soul don’t happen easily. They are always mysterious and happen in spite of your efforts. The dark night diminishes those efforts and in that way prepares you for the kind of change that is of the essence. This is why religious initiations are so strong

Psychological interpretations of what I’m calling the dark nights tend to be based on research and lack fresh ideas. Religious interpretations are based on beliefs, and they tend to be highly slanted and moralistic. Political solutions are almost all ideological. You can’t even trust your friends to give you an objective picture because they have

Every life is full of garbage—wasted time, failed endeavors, broken relationships, bad decisions—to be offered at that strange altar of this night goddess, the place where three roads meet, an uncanny haunt of ghosts and magic. If you don’t honor this night spirit, what do you do with all this trash? You probably just take it literally, associate