The Coming of the Dark

My sister says it’s going back to the way it’s supposed to be, setting our clocks back in November. It’s going back to true time, true light. The dark comes earlier and the sun rises sooner. Maybe it’s the way it was always meant to be . . .

It happens in August, autumn tapping on your shoulder. Then the September light falls and shadows appear where no shadows were before.

By October the air has turned and there’s a chill running through you. It’s time to start storing up and burrowing in. You can feel it everywhere you turn. The shift in the sun, the change in the wind. The wild geese flying, the blackbirds gathering, the darkness gently slipping in.

The earth is tilting, the sun sinking further and further south. Far north, the snowy lands fall into perpetual darkness, and I am far south wishing for snow . . .

The frosts put all flowers to sleep. The leaves drift or cling relentless, the trees slipping out of summer cloaks, baring themselves to embrace the cold as it comes. They have never been more alive than now, there is nothing more alive than anticipation.

The dark rises, the coming of the night a small urge to tuck in and batten down the hatches. To retreat indoors to the rest of darkness.

I long for the cold to shake me from the hot dreamy haze of summer. Since the end of August I have wanted to shed this old skin of me like a snake and crawl away until I myself again. Until I can hear again. Until I can listen again.

I have lost all sense of beauty and wonderment in the heatwaves of summer. It is one long, yawning dream, and I want the abrasive cold to stir my blood again, to make me alive again.

I go out with lanterns, like Emily, and break the darkness with the light. All my life I have wanted to be the prisoners put in an inescapable prison who still found a way out. There is darkness, I shall light a candle. There is death, I shall be alive. There is cold, I shall build a fire.

There is a sense of danger in the darkness, the turning of the season, the calling to changing of ways. A danger of being shook beyond your ability, to face some fear that has been rattling your cages. A call to change direction. To stir. To quiet. To remix. To stop and feel.

What is it really? This calling. How do we know it? Feel it?

Do we know it simply by looking at our calendars?

Or is there something far off in the ancient days that stirs our need for this change?

By some deep, primordial mystery, by the blood in our veins, with eyes sensitive to patterns and art, we know the changing of the light. It wakes us in the morning and sends us to bed at night.

The darkness makes us see all we could not see before. When the lights of the world go out, the darkness reveals what is underneath, the hidden things. The darkness we know of old, it can also be a light . . .

May we learn to see the darkness not as a depravity of light but as a depravity of all the eye can see.

May we use the darkness to stop looking for outward things and a way to start looking inward. May this darkness bring you comparison not to bodily form, but to the shape of the soul.

May the enveloping darkness reveal to us all which remains unseen, the concrete fade and the abstract arise. May we see not the superficial of life, but the depths and the worlds within each other.

May the darkness give not to moments where our thoughts are tinged with regrets, but to moments where we see patterns and movements, purpose and conviction invisible in the light of our lives.

May we learn to use the darkness as a time to use our hearts and not our heads to see the world, and in so doing find the light that was hidden before.

May the cold freeze our fears and turn our tears to light-reflecting prisms.

May it numb our heart aches and fill our lungs with refreshed life.

May these deep snows fill our paths not to slow our journey but to rest our weary bodies, and in so doing rest our weary souls.

May the wind blow through us and not against us.

May we learn to feel the cold not as a thing of torment, but as a place where we can hear and see the silent exhale of all distress.

May we learn to see the darkness not as a place to fear, not as place where howling monsters arise, but as a place where we are free in the presence of the holy.

The Blog