Hello, Darkness

Finding peace in light's absence

On a mild winter’s night, a few weeks after we moved to the woods, I stood outside near the porch, looked up, and saw more stars than I had ever seen in this lifetime. Constellations I couldn’t name arched across the sky. This, paired with the silence I needed to save myself, brought ease to mind and body. As I stared upward, in tears, whispering aloud, “It’s so beautiful,” I felt returned.

* * *

My mother passed on a belief there was something different about night air, as if it invited illness, even madness. With no rational explanation, it struck me as a whiff of superstition, but I heeded it. 

I rarely went outside at night, not even to look at the moon, which was visible enough, or the stars, which were dimmed by light pollution even though I didn’t know it then.

I grew up in neighborhoods surrounded by street and porch lights. I wasn’t a child who was afraid to sleep in the dark, perhaps because there was enough of a glow coming through the curtained windows or an open doorway. Out after dark meant going to a movie or restaurant or home after a visit with friends or family. Halloween trick or treating delivered the allure of fear with no real threat since adults were a scream away.

I never pitched a tent in the yard or on a family trip. When I was 10, I went to a 4-H camp in the middle of nowhere. I remember nothing about the nights there except making one last dash to the separate bathrooms before sleeping in a warm, humid cabin with too many girls.

* * *

Eighteen months into working on what I thought would be my second novel, I was outside in one of my garden areas and heard, although no one was nearby, “Go to the woods.” Solid guidance no matter the source considering I was stuck on the project and one of its major themes was silence.  I booked a hilltop retreat in rural Mississippi and, when I arrived, learned I’d have no neighbors in the adjacent cabins during the week-long stay. Miles from other humans, I was alone-alone.

Two fears surfaced—of fire and man, the intensity of both suggesting ancestral memories of flames, rape, and murder—then a third, equally ancient, of darkness itself.

The first evening, I sat on the deck as the sun set. The trees were so dense, I could see little of the sky. Once the moon was out, the darkness was dormant chaos. What horrors and dangers lurked in the shadows? Inside the cabin, I needed a light to read, but its glimmer made me feel exposed, so I turned it off. I went to bed with my pulse racing in my ears. A firefly landed on a sliding panel door’s screen. Her/his steady blip, blip, blip reminded me of the ones who brightened summer nights when I was little, but the presence alerted me to my isolation, one that required courage to bear.

Six nights and seven days later, I didn’t want to go home. The silence and beauty hit a hard reset on my nervous system. I moved slower. I breathed easier. My mind was calmer. Each night was less unsettling. I lay there in the blackness where only outlines and edges were visible, a pause on form. My dreams were more vivid, archetypal, and complex. This realm offered space I could not yet take.

* * *

That week was an initiation; that blip, an aperture.

For almost a decade, I wrote about silences and darknesses. Knew them to almost unendurable extremes. Emerged from their demands to face my immediate environment becoming so much louder, lighter, lesser (what a great neighborhood!) that I, not the same creature I was before, required an escape.

There was no other place to go but the woods. The decision to leave the house we’d restored was painful but necessary. By luck or a miracle, a house with what we needed in an area we loved became ours. Away from street, porch, and security lights, we couldn’t believe how dark it was, so dark we had to feel our way through rooms and couldn’t see our feet when we stood under the trees.

I expected a long transition to get used to the nights. I was wrong. All I had to do was pick up where I’d left off.

In her gentle aspect, the darkness opens in welcome. The embrace holds no threat. Emptiness feels full. Deep within, rhythms beat in the time of restoration. Mind, body, and spirit ease into balance. I am more human with my animal self nurtured, more whole when the conscious and unconscious have their say.