At the time of
night-prayer, as the sun slides down,
The route the
senses walk on closes,
the route to be
invisible opens.
Rumi, Persian poet, 1207-1273
Early January,
and the days are lopsided with dark hours.
We have gone through the holidays, when Christmas lights break through
the winter darkness. They stretch as
white, blue, and red strings along roofs, adorning fences, rolled in circles
around trees of all sizes. But now they
start to fade as people either pull them down or just stop hitting the switch
that covered the dark winter night for a few festive weeks.
For some odd
reason, I am reading Burning the Midnight Oil: Illuminating Words for the
Long Night's Journey Into Day during this dark time of year. It is a collection of essays, poems, and
stories about lives during the darkness, written by insomniac writers of the
past and present. They range from Rumi
poetry, to Richard Byrd's account of sleep in an Arctic shelter, to the Mohawk
native Americans and their origin story from the stars.
Many of the
authors speak of the incredible expanse and power of the nighttime sky. The naturalist Rachel Carson writes of
camping on the headland of a bay, where "the horizons were remote and
distant rims on the edge of space.
Millions of stars blazed in darkness and on the far shore a few lights
burned in cottages. Otherwise there was
no reminder of human life." She
laments how so many people take all this for granted.
It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only
once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in
any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably
gave not a thought to the beauty overhead.
Other writers note
the power of the night to stir our senses.
The explorer Byrd lived alone in the Arctic for six months, and led a
highly routinized existence in order to survive. "My whole life here in a sense is an
experiment in harmony....But a man can live a lifetime in a few half-dreaming
moments of introspection between going to bed and falling asleep: a lifetime
reordered and edited to satisfy the ever-changing demands of the mind."
I grew up on
the edge of a small village, where the night sky was rarely thinned out by
light pollution. The stars were sharp
and distinct. Winter could be the most
striking time to scan the heavens, as the air seemed so crisp and clear. The snow cover created a white expanse
underfoot that created a reverse of the dark sky with its millions of white
dots.
During other
seasons, darkness would arrive later and conjure up other ghosts. We lived directly next to the village
cemetery, bordered by an open field next to our house where we played baseball
or kickball. For us neighborhood kids, dusk meant our ballgames would end and
we would move to someone else's yard to play kick-the-can or capture-the-flag. While the cemetery field was great for any
type of game, the proximity to hundreds of gravesites at night added a spooky
dimension to night games. Being kids, we
would make eerie noises or joke about midnight walks between headstones; but
none of us would actually venture there.
Now I am in my
60s, and the darkness has other affects. Nighttime noise comes in different
sizes -- the house siding crackling in extreme winter cold, or the train
rolling between hills across the valley.
But that's not what makes my sleep restless or keeps me awake at 4:00am. The darkness limits external vision and seems
to enhance the visions or pictures that arise internally in the mind and
heart. Those thoughts start rolling
around the internal senses, ranging from angst to hope to wonder.
When the
morning light arrives, the darkness is chased.
The night visions no longer seem overwhelming or unmanageable. I do not blame the darkness, as if it were an
evil magician. Even as a kid, I knew
that we could still play in the dark.
