Matt Licata

Something about the forest that reveals a hidden portal.

If I listen in a certain way.

The birdsong from another world.

Collecting light.

Midsummer. Finland. Silence. Space.

The moon teaches us that disappearance is not the opposite of presence. The hidden phase belongs to the cycle no less than the full illumination.

We live in a culture that often imagines growth as increasing visibility, certainty, and light. Yet the natural world tells a more complicated story. There are seasons when life gathers itself beneath the surface, when what is most essential is taking place beyond the reach of immediate understanding.

Not every darkness is asking to be overcome. Some darkness is a womb. Some darkness is preparation.

The moon vanishes from sight and yet remains entirely itself. Seeds split open in the dark soil before they ever touch the sun. Winter forests appear still while unseen processes continue beneath the frozen ground.

The soul has seasons like this as well. Times when clarity recedes, when familiar identities loosen, when the next step is not yet visible. These periods can feel like failure if we have been taught that progress should always look like expansion and light.

But sometimes what appears to be an absence is actually a gathering. Sometimes what feels like an ending is a gestation. Sometimes the way forward begins with trusting what is happening in the dark.

We often imagine transformation as a kind of accumulation. More insight. More clarity. More certainty. More refinement.

We gather teachings and practices, hoping that with enough understanding we might eventually arrive at a version of ourselves untouched by confusion, vulnerability, grief, or longing.

Growth becomes a movement upward and outward, toward illumination and mastery.

Yet many of the older traditions understood another movement entirely. They knew that not all wisdom arrives through ascent.

There are seasons when the path bends downward, leading us beneath the bright surface of things and into regions where our familiar identities no longer offer the reassurance they once did.

Persephone descends before she returns carrying spring in her hands. The alchemists speak of putrefactio, the sacred disintegration through which one form of life gives way to another.

Across cultures, we encounter figures who dismantle our certainties rather than affirm them, who loosen our grip on what is false so that something truer may gradually emerge.

Perhaps the deepest transformations are not achievements at all.
Perhaps they ask less of our striving than our surrender. Perhaps wisdom arrives not only through what we attain, but through what we are willing to release.

The cup empties.

The carefully assembled self-image softens around the edges. Something we can no longer carry falls away. And in that undoing, often quietly and beyond the reach of our understanding, life prepares a different kind of welcome.

There are truths that cannot be mastered from a distance. They ask to be lived, suffered, relinquished, and received. They ask us to become permeable enough to be changed by them.

There are forms of wisdom that do not crown us with realization. They dismantle the one who imagined that truth could be possessed, leaving us humbled into participation and undone into a deeper intimacy with what is real.

You don’t have to disappear in order to belong.

Not everyone comes to the path burdened by too much self. Some arrive having spent a lifetime learning how not to exist. How to vanish. They learned that their needs were inconvenient, their anger dangerous, their sensitivity too much.

They became attuned to the moods of others, careful not to take up too much space, privileging security at the cost of self-abandonment. Anything to survive.

And then they encounter teachings that tell them there is no self to begin with. No one here. No one suffering. No one to be found.

For some, these teachings open a doorway into freedom, into vast space. They soften rigid identities and loosen the grip of fear and self-preoccupation.

But for others, they land differently. Not as liberation, but as confirmation. A shattering echo of something they have carried for a very long time: I knew it. I don't really matter. I don't really exist. I don't have a right to be here.

Not everyone benefits from the same medicine. For some, healing may involve loosening identification with who they imagine themselves to be. For others, the discovery that they are allowed to exist at all. Allowed to have needs, to feel, to take up space, to “be sensitive.”

Allowed to say, "This grief is mine. This longing is mine. This life is mine."

Perhaps the issue is not whether there “is” a self or not, arriving at some ontological certainty, but whether we’re inhabiting our humanity with greater tenderness, embodiment, and kindness. Less self-consumed with our own spiritual persona.

More capable of love, more able to remain present to sorrow without abandoning ourselves, and more available to the mystery of being alive.

The path, after all, is not only about seeing through the trance of separateness. It is also about becoming intimate with what has been forgotten, denied, or left behind.

And sometimes the most radical realization is not that there is no one here. Sometimes it is the discovery that the one who learned to disappear no longer has to do so.

We do not become whole by ascending beyond ourselves.

We become whole by returning for what could not come with us.

Every child learns, in one way or another, that certain aspects of themselves threaten belonging. Sensitivity may be too much. Anger may be dangerous. Need may be inconvenient. Wonder may be embarrassing. Grief may overwhelm those entrusted with our care.

And so, often without knowing it, we send parts of ourselves into exile.

We adapt. We become who we need to be in order to survive. But what leaves us never entirely disappears. It waits.

Sometimes it returns as anxiety. Sometimes as numbness, depression, irritation, perfectionism, or an aching sense that we are living slightly to the side of our own lives. Sometimes it appears as a longing we cannot name.

Trauma is the story of what had to leave.

Healing is the story of what is trying to return.

The path, then, is not simply one of self-improvement. It is not a project of becoming someone else. It is an act of companionship. A willingness to descend into the places within us we once avoided and to ask, with tenderness rather than force: Who is still waiting there? What had to be hidden? What was never given a voice? What has never stopped looking for me?

Many of the orphans we encounter carry pain. But they also carry gifts. The anger that protected our dignity. The sensitivity that allowed us to love deeply. The imagination that kept us connected to mystery. The wildness that refused to become entirely domesticated.

Perhaps healing is not about fixing what is broken. Perhaps it is about becoming a trustworthy home for those parts of ourselves that never stopped hoping we would one day return for them.

The soul refuses exile.

It keeps knocking.

We are often taught to think of grief as something that follows loss, a response to what has been taken from us, broken apart, or left behind. There is truth in this, of course.

Yet I have come to wonder whether there are forms of grief that arise from another place entirely—not from what happened, but from what did not happen; not from what was lost, but from what was never fully lived.

There are lives within us that never found their season. Songs that were never sung. Paths abandoned before we could walk them. Gifts set aside in order to belong. Desires hidden away in the service of safety, loyalty, or survival.

We often imagine that these possibilities disappear with time, sinking beneath awareness and eventually dissolving into the past. Yet something in us remembers.

The old alchemists understood that what descends into the depths does not necessarily vanish. It waits there. It gathers itself in darkness. It takes on new forms. And from time to time it rises again, appearing as longing, restlessness, beauty, ache, or an unexpected sorrow whose origins we cannot quite name.

Perhaps not all grief is grief for the past. Perhaps some grief belongs to the future. Perhaps it arrives carrying news from a life that has not entirely given up on us, a life waiting below the threshold of ordinary awareness, seeking a path back into the world.

This is one reason grief can feel so mysterious. It is not always pointing backward toward what has been lost. Sometimes it is pointing toward what has been neglected, abandoned, or forgotten. Toward an inheritance we never claimed. Toward a possibility that still shimmers beneath the surface of our lives. Toward a deeper participation in the life that is asking to be lived through us.

The task is not to force the door open. It is not to decipher every feeling or extract a lesson from every ache. It may be enough simply to listen. To become curious about what is stirring beneath the surface. To follow the thread without needing to know where it leads.

For grief has its own intelligence. It moves according to rhythms older than the mind. And sometimes it remembers the way long before we do.

There are children who learn very early that love comes with a task.

No one asks them directly. No contract is signed. Yet somehow they understand. A parent's sadness fills the room like weather. A caregiver's anxiety lingers at the edges of daily life.

The emotional atmosphere becomes something that must be carefully monitored, anticipated, and managed. And so a vow begins to form, often without words: I will carry what is too heavy for those I love to carry.

What begins as an act of devotion gradually becomes a way of belonging. The child learns to listen for what others need, to soothe, accommodate, and make room for the feelings of those around them. Their attention turns outward.

Over time, the question is no longer, What am I feeling? but What are they feeling? What do they need from me? How can I help hold this together?

Years later, the circumstances may have changed, but the vow often remains. We may find ourselves carrying responsibilities that do not belong to us, managing emotional burdens we did not create, and confusing care with self-abandonment, compassion with overfunctioning, and love with sacrifice.

Beneath these patterns lives a question that is rarely spoken aloud but often shapes the way we move through the world: If I stop carrying this, will I still belong?

For many of us, what makes these burdens so difficult to put down is not the burden itself. What we fear losing is the connection the burden once seemed to protect. Somewhere deep within, the child still wonders whether love will remain if the task is surrendered, whether belonging can survive if there is no longer a problem to solve, a feeling to manage, or a weight to carry for someone else.

The longer I sit with the mysteries of trauma and healing, the more I have come to see that this pattern is not a failure. It is an expression of love. It is the intelligent adaptation of a young soul doing its best to preserve connection in the only way it knew how.

There is something profoundly moving about that.

Before we ask the burden to be released, we must first honor the devotion that carried it.

Healing begins when we gently help the child put down what was never theirs to hold. It unfolds as they discover, often slowly and with great tenderness, that belonging does not have to be earned through sacrifice.

Love is not asking them to carry what others cannot carry. It is inviting them into a different kind of relationship altogether, one where connection does not depend on self-abandonment and where worthiness is no longer measured by how much they can hold.

Perhaps one of the deepest forms of healing is discovering that we are still loved when our hands are finally empty.

Some darkness is a womb.

We are taught to trust the solar path. To move toward greater clarity, greater certainty, greater visibility. We learn to associate transformation with illumination, progress, and ascent. If we cannot see where we are going, we assume something has gone wrong.

Yet many of the older traditions understood another movement entirely. They understood that not every sacred journey follows the path of the sun. Some follow the path of the moon.

The lunar way does not unfold through constant revelation. It moves through disappearance and return, through hiddenness and emergence, through seasons of uncertainty where something essential is taking shape beyond the reach of the conscious mind.

There are passages in life when the soul seems to withdraw from the bright surface of things. Familiar certainties lose their authority. Old maps become difficult to read. We find ourselves drawn toward questions that cannot be answered, only inhabited.

At such times, it can be tempting to believe we have lost our way.

But perhaps another possibility exists. Perhaps there are forms of wisdom that arrive only in darkness. Perhaps there are dimensions of the soul that reveal themselves only when our usual strategies no longer work.

Perhaps what feels like disorientation is not a failure of the path at all, but an invitation into a deeper one.

The moon teaches us that disappearance is not the opposite of presence. The hidden phase belongs to the cycle no less than the full illumination.

Not every darkness is asking to be overcome.

Some darkness is a womb.

Some darkness is preparation.

Some darkness is the place where the soul remembers its way.

There are regions of the self that remain hidden until another person matters.

For long stretches of life, we may feel relatively settled in our understanding of who we are. We learn our strengths and weaknesses. We develop a coherent story about ourselves and come to know what we like, what we fear, what we believe, and what we are capable of carrying. Life acquires a certain shape. The inner landscape appears familiar.

Then someone enters our life.

A friend. A beloved. A child. A teacher.

And something begins to move.

Feelings appear that seemed absent before. Longings emerge from unexpected places. Fears awaken that we did not know we carried. The emotional landscape becomes more vivid, more alive, more complex. It can seem as though relationship has created these experiences, as though the other person is somehow responsible for the vulnerability, grief, need, tenderness, or fear that has suddenly come to the surface.

Yet over time another possibility begins to reveal itself. Relationship does not necessarily create our vulnerability so much as illuminate it. The beloved does not create our fear of loss; they reveal how deeply we long to keep what we love. The friend does not create our fear of abandonment; they allow us to feel a longing for connection that may have been waiting quietly beneath the surface for years. The intimate partner does not create our need for belonging; they become the place where that need finally becomes visible.

This is one of the reasons relationship occupies such a central place in the healing journey. It reveals what solitude often conceals. There are chambers of the heart we may never discover on our own, regions of the psyche that remain dormant until another person matters enough to awaken them.

What emerges in these encounters is not always comfortable. Sometimes it arrives as longing. Sometimes as jealousy, grief, dependency, anger, or fear. Yet beneath the discomfort there is often a deeper invitation: to become curious about what has appeared and to wonder why it has come now.

The task is not to blame the other for what has been stirred, nor to make them responsible for resolving it. The task is to listen. To follow the thread inward. To approach what has awakened with interest rather than judgment.

For what emerges in relationship is often not evidence that something has gone wrong. More often, it is evidence that something important is asking to be seen.

There comes a moment in every real relationship when we discover that we cannot save the other person.

We cannot remove their uncertainty. We cannot take away their grief. We cannot live their unlived life. We cannot always find the right words at the right time. And perhaps most painfully, we cannot prevent their disappointment.

For many of us, this is where an ancient fear begins to stir. Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that love meant protecting others from heartbreak. That if someone was hurting, we should be able to help. If someone was anxious, we should know what to say. If someone was disappointed, we should somehow make it right.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons disappointment can feel so charged. It is rarely only about the present moment. It touches older places within us. Places that learned long ago that love was intertwined with caretaking, fixing, rescuing, or holding everything together.

But love asks something stranger of us.

Not perfection. Not rescue. Not endless repair.

Sometimes it asks us to remain present at the exact point where our power ends. To stand beside another person's disappointment without abandoning ourselves. To allow them their experience. To allow ourselves ours.

This is not indifference. It is not withdrawal. It is not a failure of care.

It is the willingness to discover whether relationship can survive what we could not fix.

And perhaps this is one of the great initiations of the heart: learning that love does not always heal through resolution. Sometimes it heals through presence. Sometimes it heals through honesty. Sometimes it heals through our willingness to remain close, even when we cannot make the pain go away.