My first three years of life were lived not far from a chocolate chip cookie factory. It was a great place to spend my primal years. The scent of the cookies made breathing itself a sweet experience. Ever since then, I’ve loved such cookies⎼ and breathing.
Maybe it was because of the memory of the chocolate scented air, or maybe because they were from my mom⎼ and maybe they weren’t very nutritious⎼ but I always imagined the cookies, not the medications from the doctor, saved me from starvation. The cookies had such a healing effect on me that the next day, I was able to eat another familiar food, a hamburger. I was lucky I was in Freetown because that was the only city in the country at that time to have a restaurant that served them. After that, my appetite returned. The dark, painful memory lives in my body even now reminding me how much I love eating.
Dark times can often make any bit of light seem brighter. I’ve written before about how, lately, I wake up 3, 4, 5 times a night. And I’ve come to feel the physical dark not as a deprivation of light, or as something frightening, but as a comfort and friend. When I get up, and it’s still dark, I look out the window to see what beauty the night had created. For example, in late fall and winter, the moonlight or distant city lights turn tree branches into dramatic sculptures, bare fingers stretched out to the sky.
Several years ago, when I was leading an improvisational theater workshop, we tried an experiment. Some of the people in the group said darkness was frightening. Others disagreed. So, we planned an experiment. Our next meeting would take place in a large college classroom with no windows and where we could turn off every light, even the exit signs. The darkness in the room was total.
Beforehand, I moved most of the chairs together, in groups, so distinct, twisting paths to the center of the room were created. People were allowed to enter almost ceremoniously, one by one, with about a minute between them. The object was, without talking or making noise, to see how hard it would be to find each other in the center of the room.
And we did find each other, more easily than anticipated. I entered last, to find the whole group gathered closely together. Once I arrived, I asked if we should turn on the lights. The unanimous reply was “no.” No one wanted light, or to leave.
Now the physically darkest time of the year is before us. Aside from the beauty of snow, winter brings many of us anxiety, not comfort. We also face another type of darkness besides the seasonal one⎼ a darkness caused by us humans, from global warming, wars in Ukraine, Israel, etc. and threats to our rights and democracy.
So, the holidays, originally created to bring people together to acknowledge we’ve reached the shortest day, can also point us to other truths. Ancient people probably worried that the light would never return. And we, today, might feel the threats we face will never cease.
Although it’s so easy to feel that whatever is real to us now will last forever, in truth, the darkest day is also the first step toward the re-awakening of light, or the first step to the coming of spring. And the darkest times of our social and political reality can awaken us to the part we must play in turning the political world back to the light⎼ if only we all act.
We always have this illusion before us. If we focus only on dark details, then darkness is what we see. We forget that without there being light, there is no dark. The two depend on each other, like the Rubin’s vase optical illusion of two faces and a vase. To see the vase, we must also see details of the faces. To see the faces, we must notice the lines of the vase. It’s just a matter of which details we focus on, and which interpretation of the details we perceive.
So, in this time of short days and long nights, let us celebrate the holidays, and let them remind us not only of seasonal change, but that everything changes. That the very air we breathe can smell sweet. That the moon is illuminated by the light of the sun and the world we see is illuminated by the light of mind. And despite appearances to the contrary, we are never separate from the universe. We play a part in the changing of human seasons.
Spring will come again.
Happy Holidays!
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
