The Magic and Mystery of the Dark

Michelle MacEwan
Dec 29, 2025
6 min read

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Prefer to listen to this as a podcast? You’ll find it on Spotify.

Somewhere along the way, we began to fear the dark.

To keep the lights on.

Dimming the stars

and the potency of the night.

Yet darkness has always been one of our great teachers and allies — a place of mystery, restoration, and deep remembering. Once, stars mapped our journeys. Mystery was not something to solve, but something that led us on.

Why This Matters Now

We are living at a time when darkness is disappearing. Artificial light floods our nights, our homes, and our nervous systems. We override natural rhythms to stay awake longer than our bodies were ever designed to, and in doing so we lose something ancient — a way of orienting, sensing, and belonging.

Within us are the skills we need to navigate uncertainty and the unknown, yet these capacities are being forgotten as we rely on technology and lose our ancestral relationship with the night.

Relearning our relationship with darkness is a restoration of balance — a remembering that we are part of the living cycles of nature.

A return to harmony with shifting light, with quiet, restorative rhythms, with the nourishment of dream life.

A whole other aspect of the world coming alive as the day slips into twilight.

The dark is not empty space. It holds mystery and possibility and is full of life.

“If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life, your tears will prevent you from seeing the stars.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

Michelle holding a lantern on top of a mountain with a starry background

Mystically, the transition from night to day reminds us that light is born out of darkness. The transition from day to night calls us inward — into our own mystery. And if we step out into the dark, the night sky embraces us in its vastness, reminding us of the immensity we are part of.

Inner vision is enhanced through this shifting perspective, and new possibilities become easier to perceive.

The night sky is a wonder we all share.

For many traditional cultures, the night sky is a living presence — a sacred map.

The ancient Egyptians saw the night sky as the goddess Nut. Her star-studded body arches over the earth — a cosmic womb of darkness and possibility. Each evening she swallows the sun; each dawn she gives birth to him anew, embodying the daily cycle of death and rebirth.

In Lower Egypt, the Milky Way was seen as her body, and she was often depicted inside coffin lids — the one to whom souls journeyed after death.

To sleep beneath the stars was to rest within Nut’s embrace — a nightly spiritual homecoming, aligning with cosmic rhythm, the cycles of life, and offering protection for souls crossing thresholds.

These stories reassure us: night is not threatening. It is protective, nurturing, regenerative. It is the mystery we journey toward.

I have always felt this way about the night — a time of wonder, of being in touch with mystery. A time when we can let go and dream, while our spirit and body are refreshed.

A Personal Story

Many years ago, we lived beside a property that was rented out for holidays. I noticed the outside lights were often left on all night and wondered why. It turned out people were afraid of the dark.

I sat with that.

Why were they afraid of something so wonderful?

This was their opportunity to see the stars.

Then I realised that many people no longer have true night vision. Robbed of the experience of a dark sky, darkness itself has become something to fear — something negative rather than something miraculous.

Within this is a deeper disconnection: the fear of going inward, into our own inner reaches.

Once, people entered dark caves and caverns to embody the inner journey. Darkness was understood as initiatory — fertile — a place to commune with the Divine, to interact with dreams and creation.

The night sky is a wonder we all share — our view into the cosmos we are part of — and it is fading before our very eyes.

Millions of people worldwide can no longer see the Milky Way. In losing dark skies, we are losing an ancestral way of knowing.

“Darkness is where wonder lives, if we let it.”

— Leigh Ann Henion

What We Are Losing

Most people on Earth now live under light-polluted skies.

Few realise how deeply this affects our senses — night vision, smell, orientation, perception — and our quality of sleep.

Our eyes are designed to adapt slowly as light fades. Night vision ripens over hours, not minutes.

Humans possess extraordinary sensory capacities, yet constant exposure to artificial light — in homes, streets, and screens — is eroding them.

As animals, we are evolving away from abilities that once kept us intimately connected to land and sky.

Darkness is habitat. When we turn off unnecessary lights, we restore living systems.

Across the world, Dark Sky Parks are being established — places where true darkness is protected so our view into the cosmos is not dimmed entirely.

These places preserve not only stars, but memory.

The Living Night — Ecology and Connection

“Wherever you are on this planet, after dusk, there is an entirely new world to be explored.”

— Leigh Ann Henion

Darkness connects ecosystems.

Many beings can only live, hunt, pollinate, migrate, and communicate beneath the night sky. Owls, bandicoots, wallabies, bats, moths — crepuscular and nocturnal lives remind us that if we erase the dark, we erase half of life itself.

Australia’s Bogong moth navigates hundreds of kilometres using the Milky Way and constellations — the first known invertebrate to rely on a stellar compass for long-distance travel. These moths are culturally honoured and remembered through ceremony and festival.

Much of the beauty we enjoy by day — and much of our food — exists because of night pollinators. The sounds in the night, especially the call of the boo-book, soothes my heart and soul.

Darkness carries medicine. It supports deep sleep, restoration, and renewal — and life.

Thresholds and Perception

The medicine of the dark also helps us to shift our perceptions.

As we enter the magical time of twilight, our awareness of different ways of being is naturally heightened.

Twilight is a threshold where the familiar and the unknown intertwine.

It is a time of transition, where light and shade, and colours blend and transform, revealing hidden dimensions of life.

As we move towards dark, there is a natural shift — not only in light, but in awareness.

This threshold invites us to soften, to sense differently.

It’s a perfect moment to reflect on how you want to be present to, and experience, transitions in your life.

As we enter 2026, we are crossing a collective threshold.

A new rhythm is emerging.

What matters now is presence, self-devotion, and a willingness to perceive differently — ourselves, our world, our place within the whole.

To be attuned to the land, we must be attuned to the night. Otherwise, we are living in relationship with only half of life.

As we engage in a relationship with darkness, we reconnect with inner wisdom — our own inner reaches and riches.

As many have grown away from their relationship with the dark, it has become misunderstood and undervalued.

Yet within darkness lives possibility, magic, wonder — and life itself.

In Ireland, Samhain, at the end of October, marks the arrival of the dark half of the year.

Winter is the first season — the darkness from which all light emerges.

Samhain is a doorway: the beginning of the new year, a time of storytelling, of gathering close, of tending the inner world.

Traditionally around fires beneath night skies, conversations deepened and stories turned to wonder tales. Mystery was a companion or a threshold, rather than a problem or something to fear.

Many Highland prayers invoke guiding stars.

As a child, I communed with the stars — the morning and evening star — the wishing stars.

I shared my dreams with them. I still do, as well as my prayers, always thanking them for guiding my way. Seeing them lit by the first or last rays of the sun still feels like a blessing.

What would spirituality be without mystery?

Mystery is the unknown. The night holds the unknown.

In darkness, we are invited to rest our body, to dream, and to meet our own mystery.

When night skies are washed out by artificial light, we lose ancestral senses — star-vision, rhythm, and a deep awareness of belonging within a vast, living cosmos.

Reclaiming the dark is ecological and spiritual reclamation.

It restores wonder.

It re-anchors us in planetary time.

It reminds us that we belong.

My hope is that by aligning with the cycles of life - especially the rhythms of the moon, we reclaim our place in the natural world, and remember that all life is sacred and connected.

In the spirit of this I am very excited to invite you to join me for an adventure of the soul, the Wild Wisdom Women’s Pilgrimage may 29th - June 4th 2026 — You can read more about it and take advantage of the early bird.