Taking Time to Dwell in a Deeper Dark this Winter
A meditation on darkness, memory, mystery, and creativity
My earliest memories of darkness spark with fear and wonder.
Footie pajamas leaf-crackle-loud against the floor, stories of monsters vivid in my head, I’d tread cautiously along the bedspread’s edge, heart thumping, picturing scaled or hairy creature-claws snaking out from the shadows to grab my ankles.
Yet, in that same room, likely in that same year, when noises woke me on Christmas Eve, I didn’t think of danger. I tiptoed to the window. There, high over treeline and fields, I saw twinkling lights soaring away: Santa and his sleigh! To this day, I don’t know what my child-eyes saw in that black sky, what spangled blend of stars and planets, planes or magic, but I remember the glow I felt, one hand pressed to the cold glass, mouth a wordless O.
Recently, I heard those familiar lines by Paul Simon, “Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” Though I still associate wonder and fear with darkness, this third lens is one I’ve also come to understand—the way darkness seems to listen and even, sometimes, reply, how it can open into a dwelling place, enfolding me in its embrace.
Perhaps it is the recalibration it shapes in my senses that makes this possible.
In daylight, visual inputs bombard my brain, demanding identification, categorization: colors in hundreds of hues, buildings and objects, clothing, facial expressions. When night falls, colors drop away, people become silhouettes and voice, building and objects shadows if visible at all.
With that visual clutter cloaked, I tune in to sound, notice the shapes of things rather than color or label, the tonal shift in spoken words, attend to what is closest, what I can, perhaps, touch. A scene I perceived with certainty before, even if that certainty was an illusion, drifts to mystery, to interpretation. Is this why darkness can be such fertile soil for creativity?
As an early bird whose inner rhythms nudge me to sleep by 10pm and awake around 5am, I begin most days in darkness. Mug of liquid darkness steaming beside me, this last slice of night before dawn, its terrain, is mine alone while my wife sleeps, the universe outside the window a vast blackboard beckoning me to pick up my chalk.
She has a different rhythm, staying up a couple hours after I go to bed to inhabit a pocket of darkness nearer its start, these regular stretches of solitude something we each savor.
We set our clocks back last night, darkness claiming more hours as winter approaches, an invitation to spend more time in the domain of imagination.
When it’s light outside, I feel compelled to DO something active like chores or physical exercise. The sun rises after all, suggesting I should do the same. Night, by contrast, falls, conjuring stillness and quietude. Curling up in a chair with a book or pen doesn’t come with that same pang of guilt as when doing so might squander hours or minutes of perfectly useful brightness.
But that picture of night, the one with a pool of lamplight spilling onto the page or a campfire’s glow flickering across faces of gathered friends, keeps darkness and its mysteries at a distance.
The poet Wendell Berry puts it this way in his poem “To Know the Dark.”
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark too, bloom and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Even when I imagine a young Paul Simon writing those famous lines in the dark, I see a streetlight’s glow illuminating his notebook and hand, the back of his bent head.
I reread Berry’s gentle challenge, then read it again. More memories surfaced.
Lying on my back on a picnic table as a meteor shower streamed overhead. Sitting on a hillside beside a barn gazing up at a wide blanket of stars. Casting moon-shadows on walks with my wife. Holding her hand as we marvel at a backyard draped in silver or stare into an impenetrably black forest, listening for owls.
Or that magical night near a river with librarian-friends laughing and talking ‘til after midnight, then kayaking. As our eyes adjusted to the dark, we paddled away from the dock, bioluminescent jellyfish floating like ghost lanterns under the water’s surface.
This winter, I intend to take up Berry’s challenge to dwell more often in the deeper dark of which he speaks. To notice the muted shades only moonlight reveals, or stars only visible when sun and moonlight fall away. To listen to the soundscapes of night. To study how darkness transforms familiar habitats inside and outside our home. To sense the stories that take wing—and to see where they lead.
Here’s a poem for your pocket until the next post. It was originally written in German by Rainer Maria Rilke and published in The Book of Hours (Das Stunden-Buch) in 1905. The following English translation is by David Whyte.
You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore. But darkness holds it all: the shape and the flame, the animal and myself, how it holds them, all powers, all sight — and it is possible: its great strength is breaking into my body. I have faith in the night.
Wendy, as I lay in the quiet darkness of this Monday and listen to our forest owls call to one another, I am grateful for your words. I so appreciate as this new week begins the connection you weaved between the solitude of darkness and the silent grandeur of mystery. Thank you!