Welcome one and all as we welcome the Winter Solstice, savor the the last days of Advent, prepare to light our next candle of Hanukkah (chag samaech, y’all), dust off the kinara for the remembrance of Kwanzaa to come, or just gather in for a few days of rest and family as the clock ticks down toward the coming of the new year.
I’m sitting here thinking about the role of light in our winter celebrations and a few other things. If my words make you think about something, please feel free to leave a comment. Or just drop by and say, hey!
In the spirit of all the seasons, I wish you all well. I am grateful that you signed up for Through the Cracks and I hope you will share it with your friends. Here’s to the New Year ahead, together.
Literally, through the cracks…
Most mornings, since March 2020, I have pulled on my robe and walked to the window to peer quietly through the barely-opened slats of my window shade. That has been the method I use to test the morning. I want to see what the day ahead holds in store, as if a glimpse at the horizon will answer that question. Yes, in lockdown times and after, I unknowingly adopted the practices of my human ancestors. Each day, I look toward the east searching for a tiny glimpse of that first precious ray of light announcing the arrival of a new day, just a little glimmer of visible hope. Even now, as I sit here in my writing chair, I can see the rosy grey beams slipping through the cracks and my first impulse is to put the computer down and move toward the window to look, to be sure of the dawning of the day. Especially today, as we welcome that sun on the shortest day of the year.
That’s right. Today is the day observed as the Winter Solstice. I think that I better understand the power we humans attach to this moment after months and now years of searching for those first beams of light. We see the light and something in us transforms. We see the light, knowing that this is a pivot point, and we release the unconscious fearful undertow created by the ever increasing darkness of winter’s approach. The Solstice (both the astronomical and the spiritual one) speaks of change and of hope, that sense of hope and possibility that we experience as we look forward to each added minute of light. To be blunt, most of us have an internalized cultural belief that the light is good and the dark is bad. Yes, these feelings are very old, perhaps survival-based, and, at the very least, very, very human.
When I say very old, I am thinking about the history of the solstice as uncovered at sites like Newgrange in the Boyne Valley of Ireland. There, Stone Age farmers constructed a mounded burial chamber, perfectly positioned to receive the first rays of solstice sunlight through a carefully constructed roof-box (a technology that disputes any belief that Stone Age culture was “primitive”). That illumination fills the chamber around 9 a.m. and lasts a mere 17 minutes. Clearly, our human pull towards this light on this darkest day is ancient; current dating of the Newgrange site suggests it was built before both the Pyramids of Egypt and Stonehenge (meaning before 3100 BCE).
But, what about the darkness?
We celebrate light in this season when we have less of it. The solstice celebrates the movement from increasing darkness to increasing light and moves the calendar forward toward the equinoxes. Hanukkah celebrates the light that burned against all odds, the light that persisted and purified, the light of freedom. Kwanzaa burns with the light of living in community, now and across the generations. And Christianity celebrates the coming of the light of the world, who comes to break open history and to make it possible for we who follow him to change the world.
But what about the darkness? Must we vilify darkness to celebrate light? My answer to that question is a resounding no; we have both darkness and light before us, we should celebrate both. I say, both light and the absence of light that we call darkness have beauty and meaning in our lives. And I am not alone in this belief. Our Buddhist brothers and sisters have a better understanding here; dark and light are symbiotic qualities, not oppositional ones. We can no longer afford to embrace a duality that puts one quality, light, closer to God and the other, dark, farther away, but go back to Genesis 1:3-5 — God called the Light good, but DID NOT call the dark “bad.” Our world, our relationship to creation, nothing can survive that distinction much longer.
And that is why I suggest that we celebrate darkness, in particular, on this day when we have so much of it. I am suggesting that we embrace the presence of both, the value of both, the necessity of both. There is nothing that will make this sense more physically vivid than spending months walking and wandering across the literal boundary between light and dark, walking in the stillness before sunrise and into the light of day. To actually experience the dark all around you, to catch the cold breeze that blows just before the light comes, and then, to stand there, surrounded by a light so blazing that for just a moment you actually cannot see…well, that is a learning I will not soon forget.
You might be saying to yourself right now, yea, I know where she’s going with this. She’s going to talk about St. John of the Cross and the dark night of the soul, or others, like Gerald May and his work on St. John from a psychological viewpoint. These works are important, but for me, both of these writers are still talking about ways to embrace an inferior quality called darkness so that you can hold on for the light to come. Instead, I’m going to turn to a one of my favorite voices on most topics, that of Barbara Brown Taylor, and, in particular, her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark.
Much of Taylor’s work, in my reading, is about the search for balance in all things, and Learning is just that…her reflections as she seeks to understand her own (and our) responses to darkness. As Taylor wraps up the “formal” part of her study, she is looking for a way to test what she has learned. And she finds it in a study originally published in Tricycle magazine. Here, the author Clark Strand introduces the idea of green meditation, a path to the recovery of the eco-spiritual roots of the Buddhist tradition. Strand, whose curiosity resulted from his own issues with insomnia, explains came to this idea as he examined the the changes in human sleep patterns that have resulted from the invention of the incandescent light bulb. To try green meditation, you need to find a quiet place away from all the modern distractions of light and devices, and begin your sleep cycle before dusk, before you are tired. Allow yourself to notice the change from light to dark — that alone will show you the fallaciousness of our dual definitions of light and dark, because dusk and dawn are the time when light and dark merge together. At least, that was Taylor’s experience. Her conclusion? We have transformed our world (not for the better) and our own relationship to nature with the electric light. We have condensed our sleep time and re-defined what it means to have a “good night’s sleep.” We are all the collateral damage of world that is afraid of the dark, and in love with light (Taylor, Learning, 150-152).
So in this season is full to the brim with our love of light and our fear of the dark, I’m going to make friends with the dark side. As the light wanes, we focus on the star. We focus on the candle. And today, we focus on the returning light as it journeys towards summer. Darkness is part of creation, too, part of who we are as humans, and we have damaged it and our relationship to it in so many ways. We have thought that we could control it, we could shape it, we could dominate it. And we are just beginning to see the danger in those attitudes.
Tonight, as the sun sets on this shortest of days and the longest night falls around me (at about 4:47 pm EST, I believe), I’m going to focus not on the light to come but on the darkness that is here. I may even talk to it a bit (another step in green meditation), and see what it has to tell me. And, tomorrow, once again, I will rise early and do my best to take a picture of my new friend, the beautiful darkness that comes before the light.
More to read, see, and hear…
Das Licht der Welt, Op. 66, no. 4 (The Light of the World - Music Video)
Der Stern von Bethlehem, Op. 66, no. 2 (The Star of Bethlehem — Music Video)