On 'Darkness':
Warning: as with most of my half-scribbled musings, this entry may contain high levels of sarcasm, metaphors and rambling.
Dark Aspect. The Dark Side. The Darkness. The Dark Path. Wolves among the sheep. Chaos amid order. Black sheep. Ugly ducklings. "Peace is a lie...etc. Any metaphors missing? Probably not. Still doesn't give any explanation on what darkness is. You can go the dictionary/thesaurus/encyclopedia route and rattle off every definition of dark and darkness in the book. Thing is, one of the first things I discovered on this dimly-lit corridor (to use another word besides "dark" ), is the individual creates their own definition of what "darkness" is, something I struggled with until now.
I'm not going to reveal how through 'hours upon hours of meditation and reflection the answer slowly revealed itself to me', because it didn't. Rather, it took about five minutes for the thought to come gasping to the surface, and another half an hour for me to dry the thought off, let it catch its breath, and offer it hot chocolate before letting it tell me the whole story.
Darkness to me, is a blanket.
We've all hidden under blankets at some point or another, and unless it was woolen and covered in holes that let light in, chances are when you submerged yourself under the covers, voila! Instant dark. Children hide under blankets frequently to escape from the monsters under the bed. Why? Well, for some reason when we're young, hiding under a blanket automatically makes you invisible and invincible to any monsters or parents who wait outside the layer of fleecey fluff. Yet in absolute contradiction, a lot of us as kids had a fear of the dark. So as young children, we hid in darkness....to escape monsters that lived in darkness. Hey, never said we were logical back then...
Blankets are secure, safe and warm. To Darksiders...so is darkness. We're not always comfortable exposed in the sunlight, it hurts our eyes and shows us for what we really are. The Dark Path, I've found, is nothing more or less than a personal self-discovery journey. We're basically discovering who we really are, or who we want to be, and doing our utmost to become who we want to be. And if we're exposed before we're truly comfortable with ourselves...that's sort of intimidating, no? So the Darkness becomes a chain. To add another metaphor, its similar to waking up under warm blankets only to find out it's chilly, snowing, and you have to get up and go out in the blizzard.
Another common theme among the Dark I've noticed is the recurring "Breaking of the chains." Hmm...holds some relevance here methinks. Darkness in itself as a chain, well, that says to me, Sith can't lurk in the shadows all the time. Every now and then we have to get out, stretch in the sunshine, show the world we're not all as evil and deceptive as they think
And if you find you can't break your blankety-dark chain yet, make it into an inconspicious-looking sportscoat until you can let it go.
/end half-crazed sarcastic rambling metaphor.