Embracing the Dark Pt. 2

I am trying to rekindle a friendship with the night.
(Part One of this series is available here)

I watched my children, earlier this week, outside at sundown on October’s last warm afternoon. They played by the edge of the forest, mere feet from the base of the trees. The sun sank behind the forest. Things grew cool and grey. Dark began to creep about, closing in around them.

They neither noticed nor cared.

Watching them from the kitchen, enveloped by warm, artificial light, I found it telling. That the dark seemed a friend to them because they’d sat without fighting it and welcomed it in.

It’s getting dark, I told them anyway. You need to come inside.

Five more minutes, they said, happy as they were.

I’m the one who thinks the night is something to hide from. My children beg to look at stars, to build fires, to catch lightning bugs. They play, lightless, at the edge of the forest as night wraps around them like a friend.

It makes sense. How can you be comfortable, after all, with a thing you fight or hide from? Of course the dark and I are at odds–I go out into it carrying light, bent on driving it off during its own appointed time. I make myself large and bright and threatening, and behave as if the small night-bound creatures who might emerge from the woods–the foxes and the raccoons and the owls–are far fiercer than I, when the truth is, I am the most dangerous thing in the dark.

I think I must grow small and careless, if I’m really to learn this element. I will have to stop fighting. You can’t befriend a thing unless you strive to know and be known by it. You can’t know and be known without a little vulnerability.

You can’t embrace what you insist on keeping at arm’s length.

I’m used to a world of boundaries and order, where I can see and plan for what comes next. Night is the antithesis of that. A time for sightlessness, and mystery, and perhaps a touch of chaos. It has no corners and no horizon and no edges, and I will have to give all mine up to let it in. It is a daunting prospect, and yet I want this. Increasingly, I want this–the soft borderlessness of night, the gentle dim, the cold and the hush and the fear of it all. I want to learn what the poets know.

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
~Mary Oliver

I want the vanishing and the rebirth. I want to shed my old self in darkness and emerge as something better.