Whom should I turn to, 
if not the one whose darkness 
is darker than night, the only one 
who keeps vigil with no candle, 
and is not afraid—
the deep one, whose being I trust, 
for it breaks through the earth into trees, 
and rises, when I bow my head, 
faint as a fragrance from the soil.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875 – 1926)

The book: "Dreams, Bones, & The Future" by Paco Mitchell and Russell Lockhart

Following, from "Cover image as Prologue" by Paco Mitchell

To follow bright lights through a turbulent sea may not always lead us to a safe harbor. In fact, we may instead find ourselves running aground. In dark times, it is often best to look to the darkness itself for guidance—to look and wait. If we are patient, we may begin to discern, without any frantic waving of arms, what was there all along. Slowly something moves toward the visible spectrum, the way black heatwave rise from the infra-red and into the red, if we persist the waves may begin to glow, dim-red at first, then taking on shape. Eventually, what had seemed like nothing compared to the dazzle of the lights, may assume an inevitability of its own. Then , everywhere we look, we begin to discover that what we wrought was visible all along. We may even find that it was actually seeking us out, and that we ourselves are charged with heralding the unknown presence

Such is the age we live in. All our bright lights fail us, and the saving factor is something yet to be known. So we keep our eyes trained on the red spot emerging from the black background, and try to make room in our lives where it can emerge into being and live—whatever it may be...

The image we closed the Vocation group today was of 'throwing the bones' -- an oracular art used by ancient peoples, our ancestors, as they sat in circles within the containing space of their tribe and looked to understand the present, the past, and especially the future....As Paco Mitchell points out in the book (p. 20), "throwing of bones" is "characteristic of that original, primordial and natural religious attitude. Once th bones leave the human hand, they become subject to the laws and patterns governing the universe, with all the invisible interconnections of chance and necessity that pertain thereto."