Love and the Dark

Have you heard about "DARK" restaurants? I first heard about them a few weeks ago on "60 Minutes" and I was completely fascinated by the concept. This slowly-growing trend in fine dining started in Europe, but it's making its way around.

More or less, it works like this: When you visit one of these restaurants, you are shown menus in a lobby area. You make your decisions and place your order before you ever go to your table. Once your order is placed, you are instructed to make a line with your party...holding onto the hand or shoulders of the person in front of you. (I suppose you could even do it locomotion style, with hands on the hips.) Your host or hostess leads the line into the PITCH BLACK dining room. You are seated safely, of course, but your entire experience once entering the dining room is in total darkness. No candles on the tables. No moonlight peeking through the curtains. No light coming from under the door of the kitchen. TOTAL darkness.

The coolest part about it? Most of these restaurants hire servers that are seeing-impaired, which, for obvious reasons, makes perfect sense. I can almost always get excited about something that provides opportunity and dignity to people who are disadvantaged or disabled.

The story I watched was very amusing because it had been filmed in "night vision". All of the patrons struggled through their meal, dropping food all over their laps, losing their spoons inside soup bowls, and pouring wine with extreme caution so as to not spill the entire bottle. Nobody was sure of what they were eating; or even HOW to eat what they were eating. And all of this while the blind servers zipped around with ease. It looked like great fun.

This one is in Canada somewhere.

After the meal, everyone at the restaurant talked about what a sensory experience it had been. Everything smelled better and tasted better. Because nobody could see them, anyway, lots of people used their hands to eat and raved about how good it felt to touch the food they were eating...that it changed everything. And it made sense to me. Normally when we eat, we don't take the time to enjoy our food. Yes, we can taste it and smell it and touch it if we want to...but we can also SEE it. And we get distracted by the SEEING.

For those of us who are lucky enough to properly working senses...we don't always think that much about them. We can see and hear and touch and taste and smell...and those incredible powers go unnoticed and unappreciated because we're so used to having them. We take them for granted. What's so interesting to me is how we can rely too much on ONE sense, inadvertently allowing the other senses to weaken in their time of underuse. The reverse is even more interesting. In the absence of one sense, the others often grow stronger to compensate for the loss.

Strangely enough, all of this made me think about love. Or, to be clearer: it made me think about being IN love; experiencing love that is great and pure and noble. SENSES are comparable to EMOTIONS, and the exchange works the same way. One emotion can fortify as others fade...and vice versa.

I've been in many "relationships" that had nothing to do with love. Not REAL love, anyway...although I didn't always realize it at the time. In the absence of love, there were plenty of other things to take its place. Fear. Hesitation. Disappointment. Mistrust. Artificiality. Uncertainty. (Just to name a few.) I was always so busy feeling these other things, I didn't have time to notice that love was missing. I couldn't have understood it in my state of preoccupation.

What I know now is that when LOVE, as it is meant to be, is present...all that other "stuff" disappears. There's no room for it in a healthy relationship because love is just THAT big. It covers everything...every little nook and cranny and hollow space...and its dominion pushes anything that contradicts it out of the picture.

I'm sure the rest of you already knew this. I never did. Not really. It's as if I've finally learned how to see. Or, maybe...I've finally LOST my sight.(?) I think I lost track of my illustration somewhere along the way as I've been writing! Either way...you get the point. And what's more important...I get the point, and I'm blessed for the change in vision. Meal time will never be the same.