Creative Sacred Living Magazine June 2014 | Page 8

In Her Shoes

with Deborah J. Milton

Homage To The Dark

Wherever we are on the planet, solstices call for celebration of the longest days and nights.

Here in the northern hemisphere where I live, summer solstice means celebrating the longest hours of sunlight because that means the return of the dark. We joyfully dance and sing: The dark is returning, the dark is returning. Oh hurray for the magic of night, the mystery of the dark. Hurray, hurray, the days are getting shorter!

Yeah right! That’s NOT how it really plays out here, is it?

Winter solstice in the north always makes me sad. Here we go again saying good-bye to the dark when I never had a chance to say, “Welcome back.” At the same time the southern hemispherians (I hope that’s a legitimate word because I like it!) are celebrating winter’s return of the light, we could be celebrating summer’s return of the dark. But we aren’t and I wonder why we don’t

I love night’s mysterious beauty. With longer hours of dark,

I can see the day blind stars before I fall asleep. With the return of the early dark, I can experience the northern lights ripping awe from my throat, the moon sparkling diamonds on the snow, the breath of the forest slowing down as trees slumber. I literally feel safer in the dark, reveling in the protective cocoon of blackness. My creative juice quickens in the winter as I turn inward. I love that shift in focus - possible only for those of us lucky enough to be able to adjust our frenetic schedules to account for seasonal changes. Like hot house plants, we modern urban two-leggeds are forced by indoor heat and artificial light to live summers all year long, producing, producing, and producing. No wonder we have a new disease called SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). I doubt we would feel so sad if we considered it normal to slow down in winter.

We forget that for most of human history, we routinely lived in the dark. As Bill Bryson writes in At Home - a Short History of Private Life, “We forget just how… dim the world was before electricity. A candle - a good candle - provides a hundredth of the illumination of a single 100-watt light bulb. Open your refrigerator door and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the eighteenth century. The world at night for much of history was a very dark place indeed.”

Apparently, though, our eyes could see more in those days of dim lighting. Bryson shares a drawing by John Harden of four family members sitting “companionably at a table sewing and reading by the light of a single candle, and there was no sense of hardship or deprivation...” They didn’t go to bed when the sun set as many of us suppose. People in the 17 and 1800’s were night owls, often eating dinner after 10 pm, dancing and conversing long after midnight.

Urban light pollution has literally dimmed our ability to see in the dark. I learned that from an astronomer on top of Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Mountains. He told us that it takes at least twenty minutes for our eyes to adjust to nighttime vision. A simple flashlight beam can demolish that acuity. We can see more stars and they seem to glow brighter the longer we’re outside in unadulterated darkness. We had a chance to experience that phenomenon before the astronomer rigged up his telescope and showed us a dying star 14,000 light years away. As if that enormity wasn’t enough, he turned his telescope to a bursting star cluster 250,000 light years away. Neither was visible with the naked eye but through the telescope they both appeared to be multiple tiers of sparkling fireworks. One woman sighed as she turned away from the ‘scope,’ and said to no one in particular, since we were all faceless figures in the dark, “Now THAT was a religious experience.”

We lose more than night vision from light pollution. We lose perspective. I met an educated business man from a big city on the east coast who’d never heard of the Big Dipper, let alone seen it. Think of the millions like him. What happens to mythos, to wonder, to imagination and the psyche when light restricts our awareness only to that which we can see?

Who are we humans without awareness of the unfathomable - made visible in the dark?