Solstice is a fine invitation to allow myself to slide into darkness. Yet I resist, and think mostly about light and its return, as do many others. I am aware that most animals, seventy percent of them, are nocturnal and are more active during the time of darkness. I am an animal that typically shields himself from the grasp of night time. I even tend to want to escape darkness.
I shutter myself from the night that surrounds a large part of my day, and I attempt to avoid the peril other humans introduce into darkness. My home glitters with many tiny lights during this winter time of darkness, helping me to avoid my feeling of discomfort. I imagine they bring me joy. The trees in my garden are dressed in light that I can see as I look out the windows.
Today, I light candles as a reminder that light will truly return to fill a larger part of my days.
Darkness is an uncomfortable stranger to me and most of my species. Friends tell me of the sadness that creeps into their life during this darker time of the year. They blame it on the lack of light. There is much resistance to what feels foreign to those of us who seem to thrive better in light. There is a feeling of security and safety that light seems to bring.
I don’t understand it all, why darkness is so much less comfortable than daylight. I wonder about it. For me, it is a mystery that goes beyond simple explanations of biological human evolution.
Wanting to become friends with darkness is for me somewhat similar to my inclination to plunge into emptiness . Darkness holds some of that mysterious quality of emptiness. Like emptiness, darkness involves the shedding of what I think I know, the dissolving of familiar notions of reality, the release of curiosity into a realm of unfamiliar dimension.
Today, on Solstice, I want to become just a little more comfortable with darkness. Even while I will walk in light for part of the day and light candles to bring illumination into the darkened evening, I will allow the darkness to creep a little more deeply into my felt presence.
I will let go of the focus light brings into my life today and get a little more cozy with the unseen, the undefined. I will attempt to settle more into the darkness and all its undiscovered mystery.