Solstice

This is a season of glass and light. I am walking through O’Hare and looking above me at large doves fashioned out of wicker and twinkling lights. Silvery red and gold balls on a tree layered with tinsel. Glass everywhere. The panes covering this airport walkway, open up the darkness outside. It is a darkness reflecting reddish city lights and thick beds of dirty snow on the ground.

Light and darkness; the contrasts seem even more obvious in this place filled with artificial light; the real darkness is waiting. I sense it as the 727 I am riding makes its way out of the night sky and down the runway. It is all around me; the interior lights of the plane flicker off, in anticipation.

The dark is disappearing. I recently read an article in National Geographic about disappearing night skies due to urban light pollution.

“Light Pollution: Our Vanishing Night”
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/11/light-pollution/klinkenborg-text

I’ve struggled with this notion for a long time, this fear of darkness so many human beings seem to have, particularly after a century or more of electricity being wired into our homes. It may be more primitive than that; after all, early survival as a species likely depended on human ancestors harnessing of the light and heat from fire.

But the dark was still there, just outside the circle of fire. And the stars were distant lights, filled with all the elements in our bodies. Our ancestors perhaps understood these things. Western civilization doesn’t; though the human connection to the dark has never really gone away, though I might still find it if I dig enough. In this season of light, there is something also heartening, not fearful, about the darkness. It is mythological.

I celebrate Winter Solstice; the shortest day of the year, with the least sunlight and the most hours of dark. I sense my own need to slow down, to sleep more, but also to breathe more and to move more when I am outside. During December and January, as soon as the sun goes down in the desert, the night takes on an edge, a small pocket knife made of ice that could cut you up if it wanted to. It rarely does. I smell it in the burning wood of stoves and the still-wet pine needles dumped on the sidewalk outside the thrift store.

But I do not live in the night, on the streets. I have passed people who do, and I wonder how they manage. I see the dark from inside my trailer, my car, a store, an airport. Once I spent several nights in a cabin in northern New Mexico, taking in the night. She was kind to me; it was summer. Too many stars to orient myself. But I never felt threatened, despite the lack of city light. The eyes in the woods touched by my flashlight didn’t scare me; they welcomed me.

Just past the short fence around the property – not enough to hold out deer or any other wild animal that chose to be there – a river ran slow and sure of itself. During the day, you could sit beside it and drift to sleep. I would lie in a chair with a blanket over me and a book in my lap. At night, I sat on the porch and just listened. The low nickering of horses in a nearby pasture. Crickets everywhere. An occasional dog or human voice in the distance. Night holding me in her hands.

Human rhythms, out of whack. Commercials for sleep medications, the search in Western culture for the perfect mattress or perfect “sleep number,” indications. I know so many people with insomnia, including myself. Staying up late into the night; sometimes to find something there. A place to create poems, art. Sometimes. Sitting under a light, fashioning words on paper. Or worrying about money, about illness, about time. Trying to capture a phrase, a bit of light, something to cling to.

Maybe glass comes out of this most primitive need, too—the need to capture light. I love the light in glass, because it is both real and tentative, at the same time. It is not forced but channeled in a natural way, as a result of the material. At its most basic level, silica, soda ash, and lime. Bits of glass were used in Renaissance paintings, to add color and sheen. Think Titian. Where did I read this?

The night doesn’t scare me. There is a light that moves through it, which is natural. The moon and the stars. My body. The glass in the window of each room, even if it is manufactured. It will go back into the ground someday. Someone will find it, like the old Coca Cola bottles I found buried in the woods when I was a child. Shards of living.