The Time of Love's Inversion

My Dad’s passion was photography, and his favorite subject matter were ugly courthouses, thunderclouds, scenic landscapes, and Art Deco architecture.

Whenever we were on vacation he would always have two cameras hanging around his neck—one for prints, the other for slides—and a camera bag full of film and assorted lenses slung over his shoulder.

In our basement, in a room that doubled as the laundry room, he had his darkroom. It was a magical place, and I loved to watch him making his prints there in the soft red glow of the safelight that hung high up on the wall.

I would watch as he carefully positioned a negative in the enlarger and then for a few seconds flashed the enlarger’s light through it, casting the image onto the photo paper on the platform below. I can still see how he would cup his hands under the enlarger’s lens, leaving just a slit between them, so he could sweep more light onto areas of the image that were a bit underexposed.

It always looked like he was creating with moonlight.

The Need for the Negative

All of this has been coming to my mind recently, and who knows? Maybe my Dad’s spirit has been visiting me to remind me about the process of creating with light and that an essential step is having a good negative to work with. Because in this collective moment, boy do we have a good negative to work with.

Here’s the thing. The only Reality is Love, and for many of us the aperture of our awareness has been opened sufficiently to know that. We can clearly see that Love is universal, that nothing is or ever could exist apart from it, and that everything is a whole, a unity, a vast web of reciprocity.

And yet, what we see playing out on our national stage at the moment is Love’s exact opposite. Grievance. Division. Greed. Blame. Attack. Revenge. Domination. Exclusion. All the concepts and patterns that take shape when the mind believes its fictitious story of separateness. This inversion of Love has seemingly now become all-powerful, commandeering and plundering our commons to satisfy its own ego drives.

Even though all of this is factually occurring in our collective dream, it helps to remember that none of it is real. Rather, it is an enactment of a falsehood, a fantasy in the mind which, having no basis in Reality, cannot endure.

So many of us recognize that we are in the midst of a collective awakening to the Reality of Love and the truth of Oneness. So how is it that we find ourselves in the midst of such a glaring display of Reality’s opposite? Well, my Dad would say it’s all about the need for the negative.

Love’s Exposure

A photographer (literally “one who writes with light”) doesn’t freak out when she develops her film and discovers that the image she photographed has been rendered in its inverse. She doesn’t try to destroy the negative, nor does she despair that it is evidence that her subject matter has been overcome by the “forces of darkness.”

In fact, the starker the contrast the better, because she knows that only a sharp negative will produce a clear photo. All she needs to do now is shine light through it.

It dawned on me the other day that the reason we find ourselves in this moment of Love’s inversion isn’t because our awakening is stalling out, or that Love is on the wane.

Quite the opposite. It is because consciousness has seen the Reality of Love so vividly that, like the film exposed to the light, it has created the sharp negative it needs to make the Reality of Love visible in this world of form.

The Darkroom Work

We are in the darkroom now, and we are all participants in this play of Light that is bringing the Reality of Love into form on this physical plane. Some of us are providing the negative and others shining the Light. Both are needed.

The negative is in place now, and it’s our turn to allow the Light of Love to shine through us in every moment.

To meet every stranger with kindness.

To hold every trauma in tenderness.

To shower every circumstance with generosity.

To bathe every space with beauty.

To dissolve every fear with joy.

We are able to do this because we have seen these same “negative” patterns in ourselves, and rather than trying to banish or do battle with them we have illuminated them with Love. In the process we have abandoned the idea of judgment and withdrawn our belief that any of these inversions of Love are who we truly are.

Joining together we amplify our Light, and as we allow the Light of Love to shine through us into this “negative moment” we come to know ourselves as that Light. We come to know our true Self, our divine Self, as Love.

All the while we are creating a representation of Reality that will take our breath away, a masterpiece unlike anything we have ever seen.