I am trying to rekindle a friendship with the night.
I was a friend of the night as a teen–as a young person, it was my favorite time. I’d slip out of the house unseen, equipped with a book of matches and a kerosene lantern, and walk the few blocks to our local conservation area. There, with nothing but a small puddle of lantern light to guide me, I’d ghost through the pathless woods, as close to fey as I’d ever come. Even when I’d grown older, night was when I ran, when I walked along the moon-glittering shores of Lake Ontario, when I took riverside drives to try and sort out my thoughts on life, the universe, and everything.
But then I grew older, and wiser, and afraid. I’m no longer a friend of the night, but a votary of the day. The sun is an ally and a familiar face. The moon and the stars have become strange mystics, bound to a time that no longer feels like home.
I’m trying to change that. To stop hurrying anxiously along the short path between car and house, house and chicken coop, casting fearful glances at the woods as if some monstrous creature will emerge at any moment to gobble me up. To pause and stand with my fear, and learn it is baseless, and that the night is beautiful just as I remember her.
Once I loved the way the trees look, their stark bones silhouetted against the sky. Even in the deepest night, they seem darker still, obsidian or cobalt against mere black. As if space–the void–can muster only a semblance of darkness, but it takes matter and mattering to be darkness. To become and embody it.
Once I loved the sly and changeable moon, that governs tides and wears a different face nightly, that hugs the Earth so close with its orbit that oceans move with its pull. I loved, most of all, the stars–those swaths of impossibly distant suns, glimmering in the sky like gems, entirely unknown and unknowable. They sing, a book I once read told me. The morning stars sing together for joy. They make the music of the spheres.
Once I loved the little Earthbound sounds of night–the hush of the wind, the sigh of waves, the snap of twigs as small things pass by, sounding so much larger. The bark of the fox, the howl of the coyote, the huff of a wandering deer. I was not afraid. I saw and heard and felt, and the night was a mystery and a wonder.
We fell out, the night and I, because of the fear I learned. But I’m trying to unlearn it now, and mend fences, and once more revel in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of it all.
I love the light, and love it well. On the way to this midwinter, I wish to do the same for the dark.
