It’s been a year and a half since we moved to the mountains. Fairly quickly, my husband and I fell into an easy rhythm. We awake before sunrise, make our coffee, and spend the dark morning hours reading side-by-side in our chairs. Eventually, when the sun’s rays grow too glaring to continue reading comfortably, I send Arin to the chicken coop for eggs, then begin cooking our breakfast while he goes out to the wood-burning shed to toss in more stumps.
Our house is warmed by radiant heat, so we spent our first two summers chopping and stacking wood in preparation for winter. As a born and raised bonafide city girl, I can honestly say I’d never considered prepping for cold weather; there was never a need. Instead, I steadied myself for the onslaught of fall sports, winter holidays, school breaks, Christmas vacations, and whatever else our busy schedule dictated.
Yet, the second we arrived on our mountain, I immediately and gladly shed every possible numerical measure that confined me to my prior life like a too-tight crinkly snake skin. Calendar squares remained blissfully bare, and the passing months were marked not by crossed-off days but rather by changing temperatures, constantly revolving colors, migrating birds, and seasonally active beasts. Gratefully, I traded the constant nagging tick-tock of the clock for the gentle reminders of sunrises, sunsets, and waxing and waning moon cycles.
When my husband is away working, I fill his shoes. Quite literally. Slipping into his oversized, steel-toed boots, I plod through the morning snow to let out chickens and check the outside animals’ food and water before heading to the woodshed to stoke the fading night fire.
In Arin’s absence, this routine brings me comfort. Instead of growing mundane as one might expect, the redundancy lends itself to familiarity, and this familiarity is blossoming into a sacred kinship with our land, the visiting animals, and our home. Increasingly, this ritual is appeasing what could only previously be described as a primitive ache, a deep-rooted longing.
Yet this feeling has been slow to evolve.
During our first year, especially at night, I had to give myself a severe pep-talk before setting foot outside, let alone walking fifty feet to the woodshed. Surely, I occasionally reasoned, spending a few nights in a cold house wouldn’t kill me.
You see, nighttime here is unlike anything I’ve ever known. It’s somehow more alive or, at the very least, differently alive. The stars twinkle and pulsate; the silence ebbs and flows like perceptibly cresting and receding sound waves, and the moon palpably sends forth its magnetic throbbings and swellings to a beat of its own. Even the darkness itself seems embodied. Free to roam where it wills, to haunt who it wishes.
Last winter, it narrowed its focus on me. Pressing and coiling around my barely-daring-to-breathe chest, it whispered of mountain lions lurking behind every bush, creeping atop our metal shop roof, crouching inside our latched wood-burning shed—all hungrily awaiting their next unsuspecting meal. Me. Last winter, in the darkness, I reverted. I froze. I turned once again five, staring down the black abyss of our dreaded basement staircase. Yet this time, there was no one offering to hold my hand. It was only me…and pitch darkness.
All of that is why this year so sneakily surprised me.
There I was last week, encompassed by the same blackness, surrounded by the same teeming, spooky forest (as I somewhat affectionately dubbed it), filling the same old clanky wood burner. I was still the same old me tossing in the same old chopped logs. (Was I not?) And yet, in a single moment, I suddenly realized I wasn’t. Something was different; I was different; I no longer felt wary of the night. In place of tight, shallow breaths, my lungs felt settled. Unguarded. Expansive. The darkness no longer pressed and coiled; it simply held space like a gentleman bracing a door, allowing me to pass through its shadows with ease.
Momentarily, I considered that the land might have accepted me. For once, I imagined it possible to belong to a place.
Stunned, I began pondering change and the invisible mechanism that enables it.
A few weeks ago, I went “back north” to visit my family in the cities I’d considered home for many years prior. Strangely, old surroundings leaped forth to visually accost me. In contrast to the darkness of our mountain, everything blared, zoomed, flashed, and colorfully demanded my attention. The moon, so big and focal just one night prior, was now a minuscule ornament hung in a distant, unnaturally glowing, faintly starlit sky, whose sole purpose seemed to be highlighting the brightly lit billboards, blinking stoplights, and mindlessly whizzing cars.
For the first time, I viscerally understood the term “light pollution.” I felt it in my body. My heart lurched at all the ways the manmade objects of this world have stepped brazenly forward, further castigating God’s handiwork to the sidelines. Like a frog in heating water, we have gradually squeezed actual substance from our lives, accepting, in return, Plato’s flickering shadows as cheap substitutes.
Driving on, I ironically noted that the absence of such artificial light had reintroduced my fear of the dark.
Apparently, I, too, have preferred manmade shadows over true substance.
Since then, I’ve spent many waking hours contemplating my experiences with both light and darkness. How can the presence of something designed to illuminate lead instead to increasing blindness and dullness, while pure darkness potentially sharpens our senses and hones our age-old instincts and wisdom?
How can the darkness teach us to “see?”
The short answer is, I don’t know.
Even so, my vision is changing. Within an ancient darkness, I am evolving.
Assuredly, nature must—much like a tuning fork—echo the vibrations of its Creator. Perhaps, on this mountain, in the absence of the once normative hustle and bustle, these energies have been imperceptibly resonating around me, through me. And maybe, just maybe, a few of them have chosen to remain in me, buzzing like tiny worker bees to effect change. After many long years, I feel my strivings are being matched by something beyond me; I am being worked upon from the outside in. This is not to say I’ve never experienced external assistance prior; I’m simply saying that it’s easier to perceive this phenomenon in darkness, in silence, in an absence.
As life marches on faster and faster (especially this time of year), we humans run faster simply to keep pace. Yet, at what cost? Despite our bulging social calendars, we are lonelier than ever before. Our days fill while our souls empty. Amidst excessive abundance, our hearts grow lean and leathery.
Perhaps it’s time to consider an inverted alternative. Is it possible to find substance within absence? Connection in solitude? Abundance in simplicity?
Can light possibly be found amidst the darkness? The universe, it seems, decries a resounding, “Yes!”
