Darkness Has So Many Names
ערב, לילה, חושך
On the first day God creates חושך, names it לילה, and the first ערב descend rights after
Darkness, named “night”, falls into evening
An essence, given a time, moves into transition
.
There was a me before this world
Draped in the deep velvet of the night sky,
Galaxies cascading in a glistening stream of diadems across my collarbones
My waist synched with Orion’s belt
השם and I danced across עולמות of space and עולמות of time, and the swirls of our hips defined the orbits of the planets and the swish of my skirt made the wind
When I was born my essence was given a time,
Like darkness into night
Given a name
And a body and a gender and an assignment and a lineage and a family and a faith and a home and a breath
And my חושך wriggled its shoulders into its new existence as a לילה, accustoming to the scents and tastes and pains and ecstacies of being alive and being conscious, of being here and being now
How different it was than the freedom she sometimes yearned for - back in the arms of השם and the infinite
Remembering what it was like before her soul and her truth were translated into a life and a body
Before there were any walls between self, and God
Trippingfallingstumblingbeinggrowingpraising, in this new world
An infinite essence learning what it’s like to be defined and alive
.
I was born at 10:59, in the deep night. My life beginning as the first day did, in darkness.
When I saw my first dawn a few hours later it looked familiar. When I saw my first ערב after that, I knew I’d recognized myself
Not in the poles of dark and light, but in the magnificent awe-inducing oil painting of orange and pink that kissed the edges of the clouds
Every day we learn what it means for the pure to bleed into the mixture, for the defined to get prefixed with an un
tasting infinite again, for a moment
Each sunrise a transition, each sunset a transition
Where demons abound and blessings reach a cacophonous fever pitch and the sky is at its most beautiful
A twice-daily wink from השם in the heavens, who remembers our diadem dances, who turned the essence of my חושך into the לילה of my life, and then who blessedly causes the ערב to drip down on us each evening, in all its queer glory, to remind us the holiness, of the inbetween
ברוכה את יה שכינה, המעריבה ערבים