What the Dark Teaches Us: On Detail, Perspective, and Seeing Clearly

It's been a while since I've written here. Life got full, between full time work and completing my studies at UTAS, and this little corner went quiet. I've missed it.

But some things don't change. I've still been out at 6am feeding the horses. That part of the day belongs to me, and I protect it.

There is something about a winter morning in the dark at Sandbeck that I find genuinely hard to put into words. The sky out here is enormous in a way that city skies simply aren't. On clear nights you can see galaxies. The quiet is complete. The darkness, rather than being something to push through, wraps around you like something old and steady. I find it humbling every single time.

I took these two photos a few winters back on a June morning. Same sky. Two seconds apart. The only difference is that the camera flash fired on the second shot, and suddenly the leaves on the branches that had been lost in the dark were right there, intricate and detailed and present all along.

The detail was always there. I just couldn't see it yet.

I've thought about those photos a lot over the years, because they speak to something I return to again and again in my work. So much of what tangles us up, the misunderstandings, the assumptions, the stuck feeling, comes down to not having the full picture. When we are only working with part of the information, we are limited in how we can respond. We fill the gaps with guesswork, with old stories, with fear.

When we slow down and look more carefully at what is actually in front of us, separating fact from feeling, what we know from what we assume, something shifts. We get our choices back. We may not be able to change what is there. But we can absolutely change how we respond to it. That is where agency lives.

Perspective is a funny thing. Forty years of living has taught me that what we can see depends enormously on where we're standing, and sometimes on who is standing with us.

It's good to be back.

Amanda
Able Stables | Nature-Based Counselling | Sandbeck, Tasmania