Address: “A Tincture of Dark”©
The Rev.
A tincture of dark spreads through
the winter light.
Light, weak as water slipping down
a riffle into the swallowing sea;…[1]
My favorite time in the arc of the
day is that moment just before sleeping. Darkness enfolds me with its inky
embrace, and I can slip down, down into the restful dreamland of sleep. I love to sleep in total darkness – not a
nightlight, not a sliver of brightness through the window shades from the
streetlamp outside, not a whisper through the cracked bathroom door to guide me
in the night. I like darkness when I
sleep. For me the dark is quiet, still,
calm, restorative peace.
Unfortunately, my husband Andy often
stays up later than me, reading in the bed next to me. And reading, as you might guess, requires
light. I’m not a fan of the sleeping
mask, so we’ve tried a variety of solutions for this clash of late night
requirements – separate lamps on either side, piling up pillows between us to
cloak the light, and finally, the itty bitty book light with an adjustable
shade that allows Andy to pinpoint the light onto his page.
It’s never enough. I
relate to a cartoon in the New Yorker last year that shows a man and a woman in
bed, she trying to sleep and he reading.
“I don’t care if it is itty
bitty.” the woman says. “Turn the
damned thing off!”
Darkness for me is healing and restful:
“Some of us are darkness lovers,” explains nature
writer Donald Hall[2]. “We do not dislike the early and late
daylight of June, whippoorwill’s graytime, but we cherish the gradually
increasing dark of November, which we wrap around ourselves in the prosperous
warmth of woodstove, oil, electric blanket, storm window, and insulations. We are partly tuber, partly bear. Inside our warmth we fold ourselves in the
dark and its cold – around us, outside us, safely away from us; we tuck
ourselves up in the long sleep and comfort of cold’s opposite, warming
ourselves by thought of the cold, lighting ourselves by darkness’s idea. Or we are Persephone gone underground again,
cozy in the amenities of Hell. Sheltered
between stove and electric light, we hollow islands of safety within the cold
and dark. As light grows less each day,
our fur grows thicker.”
I love the long nights and short
days of this time of year – the grey on grey beauty of the long evenings and
the slowly spreading golden orange glow of the early morning. But for the most part it seems – perhaps out
of evolutionary necessity – darkness has gotten a bad rap. Darkness is equated with fear, depression, brokenness,
ignorance and evil: dark humor, dark moods, dark ages, dark night of the soul. Darkness conjures up images of wolves howling
at the door, both literal and figurative -- the shadowy realm where Regret, Malice,
Envy and Vice are the four dark princes and princesses who rule with evil
intent.
If you look at the folktales of the
world, you see reflected there our human anxieties about the powers of the
night. By day the world is good; by
night dangerous creatures and spirits roam about causing mischief; heroes must
prove themselves by surviving trips to the underworld; monsters live in dark
caverns and deep under the seas.
Growing up, I loved to hear the
tales of the Grimm brothers. One story
which caught my fancy was that of Snow White and Rose Red – not the Snow White
of Disney fame, but a story of two sisters who despite being the daughters of a
poor widow were “good and happy, as busy and cheerful, as ever two children in
the world were.” The girls like to play
in the forest, but unusually for this genre they show no fear of the nighttime.
When darkness falls, they simply lie
down where they are playing, putting their heads on soft moss, and sleeping
soundly until morning when they awaken and go merrily on their way. Their mother, knowing this, feels no distress
on their account.
One morning, when they wake up from
their mossy beds, they see a strange glowing child sitting near them. As soon as they attempt to speak to the
child, he disappears into the forest, but when they look where he was sitting,
they see that he had been protecting them from rolling off of a rather dramatic
precipice just inches away from where they had been sleeping. Their mother explains that this is the angel
that protects good little girls and boys.
I guess the bad children just get shoved right over the precipice – I’m
rather certain that I would have been in that
category, since I wasn’t perfect like these two. But it is an interesting departure from most
the Grimm brother’s accounts, in which children who aren’t cautious and prudent
often come to terrible ends – especially when it comes to respecting the
boundaries of darkness and light.
In pre-Christian times the Winter Solstice,
which occurs each year on December 21st, and which marks the longest
night when the sun is farthest from the Earth, was of great importance to the
inhabitants of the Northern climes. People
would light fires on this night, awaiting the rebirth of the sun. The next morning, people would rise before
dawn, to sing up the sun and welcome the new light. Many of our Christmas rituals stem from
traditions surrounding the Winter Solstice, like bringing evergreens and
mistletoe into one’s home, sharing a wassail bowl, burning a Yule log,
etc. Even baking and gift-giving stem
from these ancient times. All of these
are designed to create light and cheer and warmth in the face of winter’s
darkness.
Living here, in the greater
metropolitan area of New York City, the experience of literal darkness is elusive. Andy remembers living in the mountains of
North Carolina when he was an artist-in-residence at Penland School of Arts many
years ago, how it would get so dark at night that you couldn’t see your hand in
front of your face, almost as if you were in a cave. I’ve experienced true darkness on moonless
nights in the Missouri woods growing up, and in backpacking adventures in our
national parts. I remember one time in
the Rocky Mountain National Park, I slept outside my tent despite the cold,
because I wanted to watch the splendid night sky until sleep overtook me. It was a magical night, but I did wake up to
find that a sheet of ice had formed over my sleeping bag during the night, and
it was a rather rude and cold awakening!
Almost as a bookend to that
experience, I remember standing on the plains of the Masai Mara in the Kenya
one balmy night, gazing in awe at rather different night sky – that of the
Southern Hemisphere, replete with the Southern Cross. There was no electricity at all in that
region, and it was so dark at night that it looked like the Milky Way had descended
from the heavens to rest just above our heads like a tapestry of lights. You could almost reach up and pluck a star
for the keeping, or so it seemed.
Here in New Jersey, it is hard to
get away from the light pollution cast by millions of homes and streetlights and
businesses. Instead of a vivid tableau
of starlight against the black of night, we see a pale washed out version of
the galaxies above twinkling weakly through a purple haze – a domesticated
night sky, devoid of the howling of wolves or the growling of bears. And as for that darkest, coldest time of the
year, the winter solstice, we are hardly touched by it any more, with attached
garages, and car seat warmers, and high-tech winter wear.
We are no longer creatures of the wild,
or even of the farm life, attuned to the slightest change in the weather and
the patterns of earth’s turning. Some of
us make it a point to get outside and hike or walk or bicycle, but even so we
are part animal, part artificial intelligence these days, creatures of homes
and cars and blinking computer screens. I
know more about climate conditions from weather.com than I do from walking
outside my door and measuring in my senses and my bones the drift of the
day. I sit and look out my window, a
viewer of the outdoors more than an inhabitant of it, and as they day marches
on I watch the sun soften, and the trees stand in shadowy relief, and I think,
“Ahhh, the darkness is on its way.” A tincture of dark spreads through the
winter light. Time to put down the
book, turn off the screen, and wrap the darkness around like a blanket, basking
in our islands of safety and warmth.
The Winter Solstice is about
darkness, but it is also about light. All
of the celebrations of this season – Advent, Christmas, Hanukkah, Yule, Kwanzaa
and Diwali – are festivals of lights in which lamps are lit in celebration of
the miracle of new life. It is a time
when we discover the blessings of compassion and the deeper meaning of
beauty. In story after story, we learn
that people can survive much loss and difficulty if we are willing to reach out
to one another and remind one another that new life is always waiting to arise. After winning a tough battle for freedom the oil
in the temple miraculously burns for eight days; a special child, a Prince of
Peace, is born in a lowly stable under the light of a miraculous star, and the
lion and the lamb lie down together; the sun indeed wakes up to the Solstice
songs, and the days grow longer again.
We stoke
the Yule log, light our candles in a row, we huddle close beneath the pungent
boughs, and tell each other tales to keep us wakeful through the night, tending
the fire, striking another light.
Perhaps what we need to learn to do, in order to
find wholeness, is to embrace it all, dark and light. When I called Dianne Kidwell yesterday to
find out if the Womyn’s Wisdom Circle was sponsoring a Winter Solstice Festival
this year (they are not) she said, “Well, I suppose it will happen no matter
what we do or don’t do!”
Darkness has a way of showing up in
our lives whether we welcome it as a friend or a foe. And the returning sun awakens us from our
slumber, shining the light of fresh possibility on us, whether we choose to
honor it or ignore it. Almost always our
suffering comes in that space between our expectations and our realities. What if we were to surrender to it all, darkness
and light, brokenness and wholeness, failure and success, loss and gain, fear
and comfort, disappointment and satisfaction?
On the other side of such surrender is always new possibility.
The flow of time and experience
inevitably marks each one of us with scars, visible and invisible. But in reaching out to one another, and in
accepting the all of it, light and dark, in each one of us, we find true peace
and beauty. The favored tree, forgetting
its treeness, reaches out in the
howling winds of night and pulls to it the tiny wren, the hunted rabbit, and
the lost fawn, and in doing so becomes no longer perfect, a thing unto itself,
the pride of the forest. At first it
feels as though it has failed to meet the expectations of the entire forest. But the Queen sees through its now gnarled
and misshapen exterior, and chooses this one for the Winter Solstice festival
in the great hall.
In this season of darkness and
light, of shadows of things past, and anticipation of things yet to come, may
we learn to rest in the inkiness of night’s embrace. May we lie down where we find ourselves, with
mossy pillows for our beds, and trust that strange angels will keep us safe
from danger not because we were cautious, but because we encountered the world
with the spirit of adventure. And when
we find ourselves bent and bruised by the demands of compassion and love, may
we then be lifted up and carried on the strong backs of hope and faith in each
other, and in ourselves. May this
holiday season bring you peace and great tidings of joy.
Amen.