The following was written as part of a series on Cuba shared on instagram.

For some, darkness is the place where fearful things reside. For others, it’s the inner shadow that slips them on like a coat. Churchill described it as a a black dog that stalked him. I’ve come to understand darkness as the bit at the edge of the map yet to be discovered, to be understood.

I don’t see darkness as the absence of light, but as a state of low light. My camera’s sensor still works at night, it just needs more time. In the dark, the light inside us works a little harder, so you have find the will to stand there and give it the time it requires.

On my first trip to Cuba, I met a woman (the first image above) who told me the story of her grappling with a demon in the middle of the night. According to her, she took a desperate drag of her cigarette, a kind of prayer uttered as the world slept, then exhaled this spirit which fled from her, agitated her dog, and disappeared into the darkness in which she still stood. No grand light marked the event, but the night, as she described it, went clear and cool. She believed the experience changed her life.

““The darkness,” Bono sings in U2’s Iris, a song in which he grapples with the death of his mother when he was 14, his own haunting spirit, “lets us see who we are.” ”

Standing at the edge of the map of my understanding, that sounds right. I recognize the truth in Bono’s lyric by the vibrations it sets off in the tuning forks stashed away in my own shadowy corners, in wounds long ago hidden even from myself. Echoes of a distant truth which compel me to sit with the dark and wait for the light inside me to push back the veil. Writing, telling stories like this one, acts as breath across a fire. I can sense the light’s strength swell.

I know there is darkness in the world, darker darkness even than my own. In Cuba, I saw some of humanity’s darkness up close. However, if you’ll permit me to switch songs but not bands, I also observed there (and in the many adventures that followed,) the way “darkness always gathers around the light,” not the other way around.

Darkness may form the border at the edge of the sovereign nation we call the soul and at times can make us feel as if that part of us is under siege by it, hemmed in on all sides by the creepy crawlies as my grandfather called them. But, like Bono, I do not believe the darkness can overpower me—overpower us—even those trapped on an island crawling with demons political, spiritual or otherwise.

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