Poetry: Dancing In The Shadows by Arsema Asghedom

As an artist, it’s important that we get comfortable in dancing with the shadows. When you allow yourself to make love to the darkness, you give birth to the most beautiful light; an eliminating presence, there to serve as a guide, a healer, a harness of power, a pinnacle of power.

Learn to dance in the darkness love. Learn to thank it, for it is the only way we know light.

For so long I’d been running from the darkness that I never knew it’s beauty. I was afraid of the dark because of the monsters I couldn’t see coming.

I’d forgotten that I could feel an intensity that doesn’t require sight.

I have been given a guide, a gift that only I have the ability to receive in its entirety, for it is already claimed to be mine before I knew my first breath, my first cry, my first introduction to this world.

It was this world I let convince me that I needed anything outside of me to be free.

Hidden in the darkness was the remedy, the key to light, the key to life...

Today, I dance with the darkness

Today, I celebrate light

Today... I am free.

Photograph of Judith Jamison from Alvin Ailey's "Revelation".