What the darkness is doing to me

3 weeks away from winter solstice.

Dear friends,

It’s the last day of November. Too cold to walk barefoot, but the snow has melted, so I do it anyway. I’m tense. My feet won’t relax into the icy earth. They clench and beg for shoes. I walk to the chestnut tree where a lone leaf shivers. The last one hanging. My feet sink into a pile of wet leaf mulch. I kneel to the earth and lift up the mulch. It’s black middle steams like soup. Smells like rot and also birth.

This morning, a waning crescent moon hung in the sky. It was an hour or two before sunrise, but a orange fire burned on the horizon and lit up the surface of the sea. My two youngest children followed me outside.

Mooon, says Rio, my 18-month old, every time he finds it in the sky. Or maybe he’s saying, Whoooa. I’m not sure.

It’s our first winter on this land. We moved here during midsummer, which means we’ve experienced very little darkness here until now.

And it’s dark. Darker than anything I’ve experienced in a very long time. For more than two decades, I’ve lived in or near big cities. Los Angeles, Budapest, New York, Atlanta, Copenhagen, and then 13 years in Stockholm. I’d wanted to leave the city for a while, but it was the Swedish winters that gave me pause. Wouldn’t the frozen landscape and total darkness drive me into the pit of despair? Winter felt too hard even in Stockholm. I was always trying to escape it. How would I survive without all the distractions and conveniences of city life?

As soon as all the leaves began to drop and all the birds began to depart, an uneasiness churned deep within. How will we survive it? I wondered. Perhaps as our ancestors have been asking for millennia. Perhaps as other animals who live on this land might ask themselves too. And like them, I found myself preparing during the autumn season. Gathering resources. Harvesting and preserving things from our garden and the surrounding wilderness. Chopping and storing firewood. Setting up creative projects. Building a creative space.

What I couldn’t have prepared for was how absolutely mesmerized I would become with the darkness.

I’ve always loved the mornings. My whole life, I’ve gotten up early to watch the dawn of a new day. What almost shocks me now, however, is my new fascination with nightfall.

It began with the moon. As the endless summer light faded, the moon began to take its place in the sky. I’ll never forget the waxing September moon that rose over the sea, just behind a row of houses on the other side of the field. It’s called the Corn Moon, or the Grain Moon, which took on new meaning as I watched it rising over flowing corn stalks and goldening rye.

By the time it reached fullness, the September moon had shifted in the sky. It rose east of the houses, a bit more north too, and traveled a different path upward. In fact, some evenings I was surprised by the moon’s location. The boys and I would search for it in the sky and then ask, How did it get way over there? Just last night it was here.

I’d never thought about it before, but of course the moon appears to be in different places each day. It’s in constant motion. So is earth. So is the sun, which directly affects how we experience the moon. What our eyes perceive is dependent on all these factors, as well as time of day, season of year, etc. It’s like a beautiful dance. Every evening. A dance that feels eternal. And yet also one of a kind.

October’s Harvest moon rose over the hillside – much farther east than the month before. From the edge of our back porch, we watched the enormous glowing ball peer over the tree line and slowly float up into the sky. It seemed closer than ever, as if we could almost reach out and touch it.

Moooon. Whooooa.

Later at the dinner table, we opened our curtains to invite the moonlight in. And just before bed, I went to see where it had traveled to then.

I’d begun to track it. Chart it. As often as possible, and still to this day. I chase it through the pink light of dusk.

At some point while tracking the moonrises, I began to see the stars. Oh the stars! How could I have forgotten about the stars? This isn’t a few faint twinkles you see in the suburbs. This is a vast array of dazzling lights that flash and swirl and burst and swoop. Thousands of them, all so alive!

Indigenous cultures believed that the stars were ancestors, animals, plants, spirits. They were guides too. People consulted the stars for shifts in weather and the calendar. We come from the stars, they believed. Which we now know to be true. The very elements that make up our bodies originated in the nuclei of stars. When the stars exploded, their elements were flung through the universe and eventually became life on earth.

They began to draw me out under the night sky too, like an invisible force whispering, Come and see. The more I looked at the stars, the more I could see. The more I see, the more I could hear too. In the stark silence, I could hear the stars speaking. Not in a language I hear with my ears. More like a frequency I recognize deep in my body. Like a vibration. A memory. A form of wildness I had no access to while living in big cities that drowned it all out.

I’m curious what questions my ancestors asked for millennia as they gazed up at these same constellations. I wonder what answers they might have found.

I’m curious what other animals experience as they look up at the night sky. I know there are many animals who live in the nature reserve next to us, and to think that they, too, even just one of them, might be gazing up at this same sky right now makes me feel apart of something very big.

I’m curious if all the trees and bushes and stones experience the night sky too. After all, we know they experience the sun just as profoundly, if not more profoundly, than we do.

I wonder how I can stand all alone under the sky and feel less alone than I always did in the city when I was surrounded by people. When I’m in the city now, all the harsh noise and constant light in the mist of winter feels so discordant, so incongruent. If winter is supposed to be dark, then let it be dark. If it’s supposed to be quiet, then let it be quiet. Nature doesn’t make mistakes. It doesn’t waste its energy. If winter is part of the process, it must have its purpose.

We live right on the edge of a nature reserve. At night, it looks like an abyss so big and so black. I can’t find the ground or a single tree. It’s seriously like a black hole, devoid of any light. It doesn’t frighten me though. Quite the opposite. I’ve been wanting to walk into the heart of that darkness, miles from even a house light, and gaze up at the night sky. I wonder if I might see the Milky Way, even faintly. Even if I don’t, I have a feeling that the stars will shine brighter.

“Just as consciously entering darkness can be the move that leads to a deeper sense of light, consciously accepting the feeling of being lost can become the initial step on the path to being found.”

– Michael Meade

Winter solstice is exactly 3 weeks from today.

And I’m looking forward do it.

I’ve always thought of winter as a time for turning inward. And it is, definitely. But for me this year, it’s also become a time for tuning into something bigger, something beyond me and even this earth. Perhaps that’s why I can look into the starry sky and feel they’re so far, far away and simultaneously right here, so close.

How are you experiencing the darkness of winter this year?

xx

Beth