PBS & the dark times
Coolio, the Psalmist, and Me
On May 13th, The Remember Balloons, a dance-theater piece we’ve toured across the country, will air on PBS Western Reserve at 8pm! I’ll send a reminder next week but the more people who watch it, stream it, etc. the more of a case we can make to the national distributors about our show!
And that my friends should have been the central message of this newsletter. A message of triumph for an independent artist and their small team.
But it’s landing in the middle of a storm (and the crazy part is I’m not even going to talk a lot of PBS potentially be defunded).
The National Endowment for the Arts—an institution that has supported this show and countless others—is under attack. The political threat to its existence is real. The grant that would’ve funded my next project has already been stripped away by the administration. And while my work is reaching new audiences, the scaffolding beneath it feels like it’s being quietly dismantled.
Professionally, I’ve been walking in a place that feels uncomfortable.
Personally, too.
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been in a season slowly reconciling with the toll age is taking on my grandmother, watching friends get spiraled by their demons, and feeling doors close before I even reached them.
This is the first time in a long time I’ve been okay with naming this place:
I am in the dark.
And the dark is somewhere I am still afraid of.
And for good reason.
Because we’re taught to resist the dark.
In our culture, in our careers, even in our faith communities, darkness is often framed as failure.
But ironically, before learning about the financial cutbacks to the NEA, I’d been studying Psalm 23, which says:
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil…”
Through.
Not around. Not over. Not “skip to the good part.”
Just… through.
Coolio (y’all remember this guy?!?)
said it another way:
“As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.”
I distinctly remember that line from Gangsta’s Paradise as a kid.
It hits harder now, as a Black man trying to raise a family and hold up a career in a country that keeps moving the goalpost for both.
That line doesn’t mean you’re empty.
It means everything extra has fallen away.
It means all you have left are the beams of a fallen home.
The bones.
The truth of who you are when you’re stripped.
It parallels Psalm 23, sure, but it also ties into something broader:
Walking through darkness.
Reckoning with yourself.
Asking whether transformation is possible in the dark.
In a way, Coolio acted as a modern-day psalmist.
The song is about a man realizing the cost of the life he’s living. He’s searching for redemption, trying to reckon with his choices, and sensing that the systems around him are designed to keep him stuck. It’s a lament and a confession.
He wants a way out—but it’s not clear there is one.
Sound familiar?
There’s a scene in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) on the planet Dagobah, where Luke is training with Yoda.
Yoda tells him not to bring his weapons into the cave because:
"Your weapons... you will not need them.”
Inside, Luke encounters Darth Vader. They duel.
And when Luke strikes Vader down and the mask falls off…
he sees his own face inside the helmet.
That’s what the dark does.
It confronts us with ourselves.
And it’s not the enemies we imagined—it’s the parts of us we’ve tried to outrun.
In these past four months, I’ve been wrestling with a theory I want to bring to you.
And as I write this, I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Rises (2012), when Bane says to Batman:
“Oh, you think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it.”
We are transformed by the darkness.
(hopefully not into a supervillain, through…)
That’s not just spiritual poetry.
That’s biology.
In our physical world, darkness is necessary.
The earth rotates into night every day.
Plants root deeper in the dark.
Seeds sprout underground.
Humans literally heal in their sleep.
Our circadian rhythms, those deep internal clocks, require the dark to restore our bodies.
Darkness is part of the rhythm of growth.
Even scripture aligns with that rhythm.
God meets people in dreams. In the wilderness.
In exile.
In tombs.
But culturally, we’ve been taught to panic at nightfall.
Especially in the nonprofit arts world, we’re told to hustle harder, post louder, prove our worth over and over.
When funders back out, when leaders shrink our value, when the floor shifts beneath our feet, we start to believe maybe we are dispensable.
Maybe the story stops here.
But I don’t believe that.
The dark isn’t the end, it’s the middle of the journey.
And don’t get me wrong…the deepest, darkest part of the night is scary.
Because…
We lose people in the dark.
We lose projects.
We lose opportunities.
We lose old versions of ourselves.
But I also believe what the Psalmist believed.
What Coolio understood.
What Luke Skywalker had to learn.
That the dark doesn’t kill us.
It reveals us.
And on the other side, if we’re willing to walk through—
there’s something truer.
Something deeper.
Something freer.
So as I’ve been in the process of experiencing the dark…
I’ve been sitting with it through expression.
So here’s my offering to you.
If you’ll allow me, I’m moving in step with the psalmist—and with Coolio—as I offer you my own version of:
My psalm for this moment:
I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
where the lights go dim and the grants fall away,
where the stage I built with bare hands feels like rubble.
But even here, I am not alone.
Even here, there is foundation.
Even here, the beams hold.
You walk with me,
in silence, in disappointment, in stillness.
And though the night is long,
the day is coming.
I do not fear the dark—
because I have learned who I am in it.
Ya boy,
Dom
"Excellent!" 🔥🔥🔥