Why the title ‘DARK HOLY GROUND’?

I was on a spiritual retreat with my local church congregation near a beautiful coastal village.  We were asked to walk out alone around the neighbourhood in silence and find some ‘treasure’, then come back to the retreat house two hours later with our treasure and talk about why we had chosen it.

I found myself alone on a long sandy beach that stretched along the north Northumbrian coastline. However the beach was strangely empty without a pebble, a shell or any seaweed in sight. Where was my treasure? The only thing that did roll up from the crashing waves along the beach was lots of powdered black sea coal with a few small lumps here and there. I finally found a large lump of it, around five inches in diameter. I picked it up but immediately threw it away because it left dirty black stains on my clean white jacket. There was nothing else left, that I could see, to take back as treasure. I turned back and half reluctantly, picked it up again.

On taking the inconvenient trouble to examine it, I saw it was made up of six horizontal layers piled one on top of the other. My curiosity suddenly shot up because at that particular time I was going through exactly six serious negative incidents in my life piling up on me. As I was about to throw it away again, feeling this was nothing to do with ‘treasure’, I instinctively looked even closer. In-between each layer tiny crystals were forming. It suddenly struck me there and then that if this piece of black carbon had stayed under the dark ground long enough with all the pressure of the earth pressing hard down on it, these crystals wedged between the 6 layers would eventually turn to diamonds.

At the point of coming off that beach onto a concrete path with the sea coal still clasped tightly in my right hand, I came across a patch of beautiful bright yellow flowers and intermingled in them were exquisitely delicate, symmetrical flowers. This was the very moment that I first ever realised they were one and the same flower.

These bright smiling dandelions and the dark piece of dirty black coal had, at least, one thing in common. The dark coal was, at first, thrown away by me presuming it was worthless, without recognising the potential diamonds within it.  Likewise, the now infamous dandelion is targeted world wide to be dug up and thrown away too, or burned as a useless weed because society, across the whole wide world, has condemned it to be so.   We have forgotten that the dandelion, once dubbed the ‘queen of all plants’  holds multiple medicinal properties, The whole plant is edible and brought comfort to many. It has a long, long history of healing powers. It’s historical excellent reputation died when, in the Victorian Era, the rich upper classes introduced perfectly flat lush green grass lawns as the height of fashion.  This rich man’s fashion sent the clumpy dandelion into unprecedented oblivion. Over the years as people began to try and emulate the rich upper classes like lemmings, a lot of the rest of society across the world followed suite, unfathomably even trickling down to the lower classes.

This observation of these two elements together became a very profound moment for me. The dandelion encouraged me to challenge a lifetime of introjected negative value statements that society had put onto me and others, as it so successfully did the dandelion.