Yule                                                                           Christmas Moon

“Hello, darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.”

I’m writing this as the long night continues here on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain is still invisible though it looms less than a mile away. These two great slabs of rock get their names from the dimming of the light. On them, this solstice night, we celebrate the darkness, our old friend.

An article I urge you to read, Why We Need The Winter Solstice, argues that darkness is the norm in the universe. “The stars are an anomaly in the face of it, the planets an accident.”

The tree we purchased in Evergreen yesterday and the lights that go on it are pagan reminders of eternal life and the hope that ancient humans required to make it through the apparent dying of the sun. Eternal life could stave off the encroaching darkness of death and the lights a world with no vegetation, which could seem inevitable as the nights of winter went on and on. The cold reminded our ancestors of what it would be like if the sun went down for the last time.

With our lamps and chandeliers, our bedside lights and even our candles we defy the daily change from light to dark. And lose something precious as we do. Darkness is fecund. It encourages an inward turn toward dreams and the deep wells of our souls. But when we turn on the TV, check our e-mail or texts, even when we open a book under our favorite light, we defend ourselves against the unsettling, Self challenging dark.

We don’t need to throw the switch on decades of artificial illumination, however. What we need is to restore at least some of the experience of the dark. Celebrating the Winter Solstice helps me stay in touch with the power, the spiritual nurture of darkness. Go outside in the night, hopefully away from city lights and look up at the stars. Then, in the way of appreciating sculpture, look not at the stars, but at the spaces between the stars, the much larger enveloping darkness, at the negative space of the universe itself.

Or, perhaps, turn off the lights in the living room every once in awhile and just sit there, in the darkness, neither doing anything or needing to do anything. Compost grows nutrient rich in the darkness. The decay and redistribution of organic matter in the forest happens in the dark. We grow in the wet darkness of the womb and return to the long night of death. The darkness is no aberration. It is the context of life, the mother of our light driven vitality. And this is its holiday.