The Dark Embrace

Becoming Through the Shadow

✨ Introduction

In our culture, we speak of death in whispers—if at all. A shadow we cross the street to avoid, lingering in the corners of our language like uninvited moonlight. In Chinese, the number four is considered unlucky because it sounds like the word for “death.” Death is cold, frightening, unpleasant. A thief in the night.

Or so I believed—until the day I came face-to-face with it, and it felt like a miracle.

Nineteen years ago, while studying for my master’s degree in England—just two weeks before graduation—I was in a sudden car accident. The car rolled over me—thigh, chest, face—a slow-motion crushing that lasted less than a second. My cheek pressed to the asphalt, the weight of the world on my skull.

It happened in an instant, like lightning. And in that split second, I had one clear thought:

“I don’t want to die! I have dreams unfulfilled. Who will care for my aging parents?”

Then—a flash of white light. Shouts. Panic. Ambulance sirens. Pain.

When I regained consciousness in the hospital, a British doctor leaned over me, visibly astonished.
I remember him saying:

“You Chinese folks are made of iron—not a single fracture! Are you a Kung Fu master?”

I didn’t laugh. But I was stunned—amazed to still be alive. Nothing broken. I could still breathe, walk, run… and return to the journey of exploring the world.

That was a close call. And from that day forward, I began to feel a deep curiosity about death.

Years later, as I watch my parents trace the edges of their own mortality—and hear them murmur the names of friends, neighbors, and colleagues who’ve passed—I’ve become more familiar with death’s presence.

Through the lens of Buddhist wisdom, I’ve come to see life as a cycle. Death is not an end, but a transition. Just as joy and suffering are two faces of the same coin, so are life and death.

I also believe we don’t experience death just once. Physically, in this life, yes—but metaphorically, emotionally, spiritually—we could die and be reborn many times.

A heartbreaking loss.
A shattering accident.
A grief that almost swallows you whole.
These are deaths, too.

🦋🦋🦋

Consider the butterfly—not merely as metaphor, but as alchemy. A quiet riot against endings.
In Square One of the Change Cycle, the caterpillar does not simply transform. It dissolves completely—becoming cellular soup, a liquid hymn of imaginal cells dreaming wings.

Out of that breakdown, something new awakens. Something that flies.

The Dark Embrace lives in Square One. In darkness, we surrender who we thought we were, so something wiser, freer, and truer can emerge. It speaks to that raw, liminal space where the ego loosens its grip, where the heart learns to crack open and carry nothing, and where we begin to sense that death—whether literal, emotional, or symbolic—is not an end, but a return.

And a new beginning starts.

I hope this poem meets you wherever you are in your own journey—and offers you a moment of stillness, courage, hope, and grace.

🖋️ The Dark Embrace

By Sammi HAN 静辰
PresentWordTravels Poetry Collection | 2025

You, shadow I’ve known since first breath—
you who drink my tears into the clay of earth,
you who hold the threshold where all names dissolve:
must I name you? You are the unworded hymn
the night sings to the unborn.

You are no pursuer. You are the space
between my ribs where the wind pauses,
where the unfinished melody of living
turns its face to the wall.

I called you enemy, but you—
you are the mold that shapes the candle,
the silence that ripens the cry.

And when at last we dance—
your hand colder than moonlight on stone—
I become the vessel, you the wine.

O heavy lightness, O winged dream,
how you teach me to carry nothing
into nowhere, and call it flight.

Then—only then—do I hear it:
the note beyond the scale,
the chord that holds both dirge and lullaby.

You were never the end,
only the mouth of the river
drinking itself back to the source—
this endless becoming.

🌑 An Invitation to Sit with the Dark

After reading The Dark Embrace, take a moment to slow down.
Close your eyes.
Breathe into the space where your last certainty dissolved.

Ask yourself:

🦋 When have you been unmade?
(A loss, a leaving, a breaking you didn’t consent to)

🦋 What grew in that hollowed-out silence?
(Perhaps nothing yet—and that too is sacred)

✨ Write a letter to your shadow, beginning with:
“You who shaped me when I thought I was shattered…”

Or

✨Draw the weight you carry—then let the paper drink it.
(Burn or bury it as ritual release)

🕯️ Remember:
The dark is where the stars are born—
a stillness shaping what comes next.

My love to you!
Sammi HAN 静辰