Onward Into the Night
I know this is the season of gathering darkness, I can tell from the fact that the sun sets way before dinnertime and rises just in time for me to walk the dog before work. It is winter here: the new grass is taller than my shoes, the ground is always damp, and the night air burns my nose with its mixture of cold, wet, and woodsmoke.
In my effort to clean up the front yard, I’ve started hauling the chopped ends of 2 x 4s, construction cast-offs that have been lost to the overgrown grasses, into piles and onto the back porch. So far I have barely made a dent in the seemingly endless supply of ready firewood around here. The woodstove has been going every night for the past couple weeks, ever since the unseasonable warm spell around the last full moon passed away. I find myself remembering that Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter where it’s the coldest winter on record for the settlers and they use up all their wood, and by the end they’re spending all day twisting grass together to keep something burning in their stove as they all huddle around it. Melodramatic, I know, but I enjoy being able to tell from the morning clouds what kind of weather is coming in, and how much time I have to bring more wood inside before it starts raining.
I am used to equating winter with a mythic descent into the dark, like Psyche or Kóre entering the Underworld. In years past this association has worked for me, but not this year. Maybe it’s because I’m not living around as many trees as I’m used to, and the darkness has fewer places to gather. The hills around here are bare, windswept, and rise in uneven arcs against the sky as though etched with the finest chisel. Trees survive only in the hollows, though there are occasional stands of cypress here in town and on the ranchland surrounding us, planted as windbreaks by an earlier generation of coast dwellers.
Sometimes it is late by the time I get home at night, and I have to walk Vince in the pitch black. I don’t bring a flashlight, and though I have to rely on my feet knowing the trail into the empty circuit of road that is our local dog run, when I get there I can dimly make out the white of the sidewalk against the black asphalt–enough to feel confident as we walk through the silent night. Above me the stars are a glittering majesty, the Milky Way so clear and beautiful it is almost painful to behold. The clouds, if there are any, come in like long wisps of light, or dense and mottled like the shell of a giant tortoise.
There are birds sometimes, the shadow of a barn owl flying low, fast and effortless. Vince’s presence stirs up some red pharalopes sleeping on the road, that cry out and take wing invisibly as we walk. But mostly our only accompaniment is the foghorn and the constant surge of the surf in the distance. This does not feel like a gathering of anything; this is a great emptiness, a night more vast than I have yet experienced. It is an emptiness that does not rule out light, or heat, or happiness, but puts them in their proper context: pinpricks of starlight in its great expanse, made visible to us now through the trick of the seasons.
I am spellbound by the ruthless clarity of this winter, awestruck at the stark beauty all around me, and happy in my warm, brightly lit little corner of the universe while the wheel of the year spins so close outside my windows. There is a peace in the darkness, and a respite which I desperately need. These days, I breathe it in with the cold and wet, and it feels wonderful.
December 3rd, 2005 at 8:37 am
Thank you. Wow. Thank you.