Around October every year, I catch myself counting the days until the winter solstice, not because I celebrate in any special way (though I should), but because it’s when I breathe a sigh of relief that the steady progression toward shorter days and longer nights will start to reverse itself. The darkness won’t consume me after all.
Seattle sits a latitude line farther north from where I grew up in Indiana, which feels like a substantial difference, though when I looked it up just now the daylight was shorter by only 48 minutes. Maybe it’s because the sun cuts a lower trajectory on the horizon, such that even on a clear day between the months of November and February, the light intensity is not enough for our skin to produce vitamin D. We have to supplement. Maybe it’s because of the marked contrast from the summer solstice when we have 7 hours, 33 minutes more daylight than today (a whopping 15 hours, 58 minutes in all). Maybe it’s because winter here is generally dreary and despite a rare accumulation of snow on the ground right now, the forecast says it will melt on Friday followed by 5 days of rain. So much for a white Christmas. Maybe I’m just older and grumpier and less tolerant than I used to be.
From a rational standpoint, I know my attitude is ridiculous. Futile. This is the way the earth orbits. My lack of acceptance will not influence it. And, of course, there are alternatives. I could move south (unlikely), or, I could “stop being a night-resister,” as Jeannette Winterson encourages us to do in her essay, Why I Adore the Night: “We should…learn to celebrate the changes of the seasons, and realign ourselves to autumn and winter, not just turn up the heating, leave the lights on and moan a lot.”
She invites us to pass a night or a weekend without electric light:
“Spending the evening in candlelight, and maybe by the fire – with no TV – talking, telling stories, letting the lit-up world go by without us, expands the hours, and alters the thoughts and conversations we have. I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.”
In some traditions, the winter solstice, or midwinter, represents the cycle of death and re-birth. It is a time for introspection.
Winterson continues,
“Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.”
I’m committed to spend an evening without artificial light in the coming week. Perhaps you will, too.
Less moaning, longer pauses.
If you like this post, please share.
I love that idea! I wonder if my kids would be open to that plan. I’m going to pitch it this year. Cheers to adding back light to our days!