It is the darkest day of the year for those of us who call the Northern Hemisphere home. In Fort Collins, Colorado where I am currently planted, that makes for about 14 hours and 45 minutes of sweet, inky night. It also happens to be one of the coldest nights of the year, dropping soon to negative 10 degrees. I am grateful to be out of the camper and cozily bundled up in the warmth of a friend’s home. I do love bearing witness to the coldest, darkest days, but ideally from a bundle of blankets parked directly in front of a heating vent.
Even on this shortest day, we will still receive about an hour more daylight than we did in Bellingham, Washington. Which is to say the literal darkest days of my life were the two solstices I experienced there. I have never made it further north. I have never craved sunshine as badly as I did there and I wonder if I ever will again.
I had a journalism professor in grad school who traveled to Norway in search of stories about darkness. He found most of the locals quite liked the months of total night because they saw it as an opportunity for extended cuddling and intimacy. More sex. He told us this story over and over again throughout my two years of grad school because he found it so delightful. A warm embrace of darkness is always such a curiosity, a bewilderment to those of us so regularly bound to the light.
Orion’s Belt has reemerged, three perfectly aligned dots of light in the deep night sky. It is a familiar reminder to recenter, to re-align, to arrive. I recognize it everywhere I go, everywhere, that is, that the tilt of the planet allows this particular constellation to drift overhead. I feel at home under the cold glow of these three pale spots. I like the simplicity of the constellation. There’s nothing flashy about the Belt, no eye squinting or connecting the dots required.
We leave for Arizona in a few weeks and I’m eager to see if Orion follows us or leaves me scanning the night sky for some new waypoint. I know this is something I can Google (or perhaps should just innately know based on basic geography) but I’d like to drive south and see for myself.
In Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard says, “You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.”
So of course, I sit outside in the dark. And I also turn inwardly into the darkest parts of myself, searching for the internal stars, those constant constellations who demand nothing of me, yet offer everything worth knowing.
The winter solstice is an excellent time to remember the necessity of darkness no matter how readily we may fight it. For the analytical among us, there are quite literally experiences impossible without it. Stargazing is a fine example. As are witnessing auroras and the ways in which lightning bugs shimmer in hemlocks, and also discovering that the moon waxes and wanes again and again.
For those less logically inclined (and I am of that camp), there is metaphorical darkness that each of us is destined to discover in our own good time. Don’t, however, be confused by the binary which is played out and trite — darkness as badness or evil, goodness and purity as light.
Instead, we should queer darkness and end those either/or dynamics.
Darkness is re-birth
First, there is the dark night of the soul in which one goes through a metaphorical death, a great loss, or some other great upheaval. Though unsettling, it is not an evil or a sickness. Eckhart Tolle says that those who go through these dark nights, “...awaken into something deeper, which is no longer based on concepts in [their] mind. A deeper sense of purpose or connectedness with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It’s a kind of re-birth.”
Darkness is sacred
Then there is the dark descent into the underworld or the descent into the unconscious. A journey into the earth, below the ground, far from the light. Our mythic, folklore characters descend below the earth into a sacred darkness and find their intuitive selves. The underworld is where our instinctual knowledge resides. Darkness is our conduit to knowing ourselves.
Darkness is transformation
I’ve seen this quote from Katherine May’s phenomenal book Wintering flitting around various social media platforms over the last few weeks and I think the concept of wintering can be equated with the concept of darkness:
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
Withdrawing from the world is something that feels incredibly difficult and utterly necessary this time of year. I crave a retreat into myself, yet the work day remains 8 hours long, and the schedule still a firm 9-5. It feels quite difficult to perform an extraordinary act of metamorphosis in between emails and year-end reviews.
I like this quote from the book quite a lot, but I also can’t tell if it’s intended for me or perhaps for someone else. I’d love to winter properly but financially, there’s rent to be paid and PTO to clock. Perhaps the bosses and directors and CEOs could take note? There is only so much brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight that can be done when you must appear productive and in continuous chipper spirits 40 hours (or more!) a week, regardless of the weather, or the darkness, or the calls from the underworld.
Every year in the U.S., thousands of migratory birds die from window collisions at night. The lights, especially on overcast nights, confuse them. They require darkness but we have been quite diligent in eliminating it at all costs. The birds are searching for the stars and instead succumb to the 24-hour blinding light of capitalism. The buildings stay lit, production continues, birds die. There is always someone in the penthouse pretending the darkness of winter does not exist for fear of lost profits. Too many of us fight winter and continue grinding, whirring, chugging, producing, enhancing, growing, and expanding when nothing else in the world functions this way.
I desire restful, dark nights and no productivity and very much alive birds. I am caught up somewhere in between.
When I figure out how to winter, how to belong to darkness in the darkest days of the year, and also pay my rent (or my camper payment…), I promise to let you in on the secret. If you discover it before then, maybe drop me a line?
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this, from Katherine May: “Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”
Literally just finished the book Wintering this past week - lovely to read this from you right afterwards! Wish we could sit by the lake at dusk and talk more about it together like "old" times.