I don’t remember when I heard about A Wrinkle in Time for the first time, but I do know where I heard about it. My mom had told me one day that one of her favorite books of all time was this book.This is probably why it somehow remained lodged in my subconscious, waiting for the perfect time to make its debut.
Timing is everything.
Several weeks after our move to Virginia I continued to find boxes of odds and ends. A box full of gardening supplies was uncovered and I brought it out to the shed in the backyard. As I found homes for the random treasures inside, I began to really look around the shed… seeing that there was lots of neat paints, spray paints, tools and even a book. Sure enough, there, sitting high up on a shelf was a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I softly laughed to myself and pulled it down. I sent a photo of the new treasure to my mom and told her maybe it was a sign!
However, I’m usually finding books I need to read while I’m already reading a good book… and Wrinkle ended up in my nightstand, unread.
This was about 3 months ago.
On Thursday night last week, my husband and I were relaxing and surfing around on YouTube. One of his favorite things to do is catch up on new movie trailers. I wasn’t really paying attention to them, and was putting away laundry… when the music from one of the trailers caught my attention. I looked over to see Chris Pine, Oprah, Zach Galifianakis – to name a few famous faces… and a very vivid movie trailer was wrapping up. When I saw the name of the movie that Disney was coming out with… ‘A Wrinkle in Time’… I knew again, timing is everything.
This time I took the hint.
I opened my nightstand, and tada!… there she sat. Waiting patiently for me to be ready to read.
The next day I drove to the beach and read for several hours. Within the first few pages, I realized again that the Universe delivered me to an answer. This book, the answer to many of my questions, the spark for major insights and deeper understanding.
Most would tell you that the book is a ‘kid’s book’. Fair enough. Most would tell you it is fiction… fair enough. I read it like fiction, but I also have a wild and creative mind… and the book is loaded with what some might call irony, or prophecy, or just insane similarities.
The theme that struck me profoundly was the battle that was raging through the Universe against the darkness. The book focuses on the power of the mind, the power of our thoughts and how many of us become imprisoned by our own thinking. There is a dark power that much of the Universe is at war with. There are planets that are “dark” planets, because the inhabitants simply gave up their choice to be different, to think their own thoughts, to exercise the freedom that comes with the mind.
While I was reading Wrinkle, the similarities on the pages, compared to what we have created in our society today sent me reeling. Literally. There were times when I had to remind myself that the book is in fact fiction, and set it down… then come back to it. This just shows that the struggle that L’Engle writes about has been going on for a very long time.
The darkness is fear. It’s blame, it’s guilt, it’s conformity.
Pain.
Control.
Above all things it’s control.
Normally, I’m a very optimistic person, and this article is certainly not meant to enhance the darkness in our world, but look around. There are a lot of battles going on right now. From what color hair is acceptable, to controlling your children, to who has the right ‘God’, to whom you can and can’t love, to your worth on a financial level. Those are dark subjects, and the world we live in is pulsing with them. Darkness creeps into our thoughts by default and soon we are at war with our friends on Facebook because they are “different” from us.
However, wherever there is darkness, there is a call to introduce light.
This is the goal my friends, and it’s the only way that we can get out of the shadows. I do not believe for a minute that the world is in trouble. I believe that there is balance in all things, including the state of our planet. I see the chaos… believe me, I see it. But I also see the remedy, and the remedy to darkness is light.
And light is everywhere.
Meg, the lead character in the book has to first save her father who was imprisoned by the darkness. Then later on in the book she has to save her little brother. The task seems impossible to her, and all of her ‘faults’. The darkness has her brother under its spell, so deep and so lost that she of course doubts that she can do anything to save him. But there is one thing that darkness cannot stand up to and that is light.
And what is light?
Light is love.
There was a line in the book that hit me so profoundly… Meg’s father is speaking about his young son who is lost to the darkness and says: “from what you’ve told me it’s because he thought he could deliberately go into IT (darkness) and return. He trusted too much to his own strength -”
When we think we can defeat the darkness by protesting it, by condemning it, by raging war with it, we become it. We cannot fight darkness except by introducing light. Introducing love.
This is not a new concept friends. All of the greats new this. Jesus knew it, Ghandi, Buddha, Mother Theresa, Einstein…. And millions more are awakening to it.
Now many may be thinking, ‘How can I love darkness? How can I love the people who hate me, who try to control me, who diminish me?’
The answer is, right now, you can’t.
But you can still love.
You introduce light wherever it is easy for it to be introduced. Meg saved her brother Charles not by loving the darkness, but by loving him, her brother.
When you live your life with the intention to love, the more you live this way, the more you see opportunities everywhere to love. You love your children. You love your dog. You love a cup of coffee. You love the pink clouds at sunset. It doesn’t matter what you put your attention on, when you are radiating love, you are living in the light and the darkness is irrelevant.
And the more people that live from this place, the more we crawl out of the shadows.
The world is a magnificent place. Even if you look at all of the chaos… there is order in the chaos. The darkness in Wrinkle wanted control,but there are people who will stand up stubbornly and love when others chose to hate, then darkness fades out.
Everything is exactly as it should be, this I promise you.
The darkness is, and always will be a call to bring in light.
Through love.
Natural Peace Living 