Dark the Night, Yet She is Bright

George Eliot:

Dark the night, yet is she bright,
For in her dark she brings the mystic star,
Trembling yet strong as is the voice of love
From some unknown afar.
O radiant dark, O darkly foster'd ray,
Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow day.

I have learned to love the dark. That hasn’t been easy. Like everyone else, I live in a culture that vilifies darkness and glorifies light. We are regularly buffeted by references to dark as something bad:

Being in a dark place is to be fearful, angry, confused, or in pain.

To be left in the dark is to be abandoned, unknowing.

A dark horse is one previously unknown that bursts, surprisingly, into prominence.

A black heart is one consumed with hatred.

To be unenlightened is to be ignorant.

The Dark One is Satan.

The Bible speaks of “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matt 22:13)

Dark is a metaphor of evil, for things sinister, threatening, and scary. Light, on the other hand, is a metaphor for wisdom, good, heaven, God.

The villain, the wicked stepmother, and the witch all wear black. The good fairy, hero, and princess all wear white.

I don’t need to recount the obvious connection between racism and our culture’s valorizing things that are white and villainizing things that are black. Given my age, I spent my childhood seeing only white actors on television and in movies. In westerns, the good guys wore white hats. The bad guy wore black hats. The good guys rode into town on white horses. Guess what color horses the bad guys rode? Okay, you don’t even need to guess. You already know.

So, I have spent time retraining myself. Among other things, that has meant learning to love winter, the dark season, and night, the dark period of our 24-hour daily span. Because, if I don’t love the dark, I cut myself off from half my life.

I have been fortunate to experience true night occasionally — watching the night sky in remote locations, with no ambient light to diminish my view of the Milky Way. But most times, true darkness is lamentably elusive. When I sleep at night, a street light shines onto my pillow. My cell phone winks on and off as it recharges beside the bed. The clock in the kitchen glows. On morning walks, even if I sally forth in what passes for darkness in my neighborhood, it's not really dark. Streetlights illuminate the road. Porch lights shine. Motion detecting lights flash on when I pass certain yards.

Most human beings seem to choose illumination over darkness. Our earth glows when viewed from the heavens. Research increasingly identifies the harm that so much ambient light causes not only to human health, but also to the health of other species. Nonetheless, we humans seem hell-bent on beating back the shadows of night. Why?

In true night, vision becomes acute in a different way. When it's genuinely dark, it's harder to escape the inner life of heart and soul. When it's harder to see outside, the inner focus comes into view. Fears and worries become magnified, grief sharpens, doubt and confusion become acute. Perhaps, ultimately, that inner journey is what humans most seek to escape by lighting every shadowed corner. Perhaps all those artificial lights are an attempt to hold at bay our worries, fears, grief, doubt, and confusion.

But that deep wrestling of the heart and soul makes us more whole and gives our lives meaning in the end. “I actually think sadness and darkness can be very beautiful and healing,” says Duncan Sheik. (Duncan Sheik: 'I actually think sadness and darkness can be very beautiful and healing.' — The Socratic Method) By welcoming those feelings we might rather push aside or ignore, perhaps we could embrace the complexity of life, increase our understanding of self and others, hasten healing, and deepen joy and satisfaction.

Darkness offers other unique benefits. Chief among them is the opportunity to sense the world differently.

In her book, Learning to Live in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

By most estimates, 70 percent of our sense receptors are located in our eyes. When they are working, they can take over most of the duties of all the other senses. On a night with no moon, it is not only possible to see the distant glow of the nearest town on the horizon; if you lived on a prairie with no trees, you could also see a single candle in a window ten miles away... There is so much more visual information available to most of us than we really want to see that we close our eyes to think, to kiss, and to listen. (p. 92)

Think about that for a minute. We close our eyes to think, to kiss, and to listen. Too much “enlightening” is too much. We need some endarkening, too, so that we can sense more fully, more acutely, more accurately, more meaningfully.

Most living things emerge from darkness: The seed from the soil, the moth from the cocoon, the eagle from the egg tucked safely under its mother’s belly. Our first home is a dark home. Floating in the waters of our mother’s womb, we are guided by the physical sensations of touch and sound, perhaps even taste.

One day, many years ago during the darkening season and near the approaching winter solstice, I was walking in the woods with my husband at the end of my pregnancy. At the time, we couldn't know that walk would be our last one together before becoming parents. That afternoon, I went into labor. Our son was born just after 10 p.m. that night. When I think back on those earliest days of motherhood, what I remember most vividly are the times of darkness — rising in the middle of the night to feed the baby, walking with the baby in my arms until he fell asleep, rocking in a rocking chair, cocooned by darkness as the wee hours drifted on. It seemed the whole world floated by in those slumbering, dark hours. And in the quiet, as I held my swaddled baby, his cheek and tiny fingers resting against me, I knew a peace I had never known before.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, when dark and light are, briefly, in perfect balance. Then our endarkening world starts enlightening again. All around me I hear people eagerly anticipating the growing light. I understand that. I really do. But a part of me is sad to bid farewell to the growing dark. To the peace. To the quiet. To the inner journey. So, before the enlightening commences, I send my praises to the darkness, my one good thing for this week. All hail the dark!

Love,

Sylvia