The Descent
Finding light in the darkness through music
There's a fever in the collective body right now. You can feel it even when you try to tune out the news – that subtle sensation that something is building, like a terrible fever. It can feel hard to feel hopeful about anything.
It reminds me of that moment in Lord of the Rings when the hobbit Frodo laments the dark times they're living through:
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
In these moments of gathering darkness, I find myself returning to a particular musical journey, a carefully curated five-hour playlist of sacred music that Mendel Kaelen – neuroscientist, founder of Wavepaths and writer of
– created as part of his PhD at Imperial College London.But it's two specific pieces within this vast emotional landscape that keep drawing me back, speaking to something fundamental about descent and rebirth.
About an hour in, a classical piece begins almost imperceptibly, like a tectonic plate moving a world of rock. For nearly twenty minutes, it builds but takes you deeper and deeper, each passing moment taking you further into the shadows until you reach the depth of Henryk Górecki's "Symphony No. 3, II. Lento." Here, in this stark and haunting movement, you find yourself in the depths of despair. I find it really quite bleak, a sonic representation of what it means to be truly lost in the dark night of the soul.
But just when you think you can't descend any further, when the weight of Górecki's lament threatens to become unbearable, something extraordinary happens.
One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
Like the first ray of dawn breaking through storm clouds, Joseph Canteloube’s arrangement of a traditional Auvergne song begins to rise.
It's one of those rare pieces of music that seems to capture the very essence of hope.
Not the shallow optimism of someone who's never known darkness, but the hard-won hope of one who has walked through the valley and emerged on the other side.
This musical passage from darkness to light has become more than just an aesthetic experience for me.
It serves as a reminder, almost a ritual, that I return to whenever the world feels particularly heavy.
The transition between these two pieces tells a really important truth: the night may be dark, but dawn always arrives. We won’t know before we get there, what we’ve lost, but it will come.
It's a truth woven into the very fabric of existence, from the turning of seasons to the great cycles of history.
What makes this musical journey so powerful is not just its beauty, but its honesty.
It doesn't shy away from the depths. I think that Górecki's piece is uncompromising in its exploration of sorrow. But the wisdom of what Mendel did in his arrangement of this music, was he didn’t leave us there.
The emergence into light feels earned precisely because we've experienced the full weight of darkness.
In our current moment, as we collectively sense storm clouds gathering, perhaps this is what we need to remember.
The descent, however frightening, is part of a larger cycle.
The light doesn't arrive despite the darkness. It arrives through it, because of it, transformed by it.
As we face whatever comes next, I increasingly feel our task isn't to avoid the descent but to learn how to move through it with grace, holding onto the knowledge that even in the deepest dark, dawn is already on its way.
Like the hobbits in Tolkien's tale, we might not have chosen these times, but we can choose how we navigate them, finding our own ways to keep faith with the coming light.
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PS. If you want to go on your own personal journey through Mendel’s playlist, click on through…