For some reason, your post brought this poem to mind: thenewgreen

In a Dark Time BY THEODORE ROETHKE

  In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
  I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   
  I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
  A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
  I live between the heron and the wren,   
  Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

  What’s madness but nobility of soul
  At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   
  I know the purity of pure despair,
  My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   
  That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   
  Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

  A steady storm of correspondences!
  A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   
  And in broad day the midnight come again!   
  A man goes far to find out what he is—
  Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   
  All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

  Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   
  My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   
  Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
  A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   
  The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   
  And one is One, free in the tearing wind.