On this shortest, darkest day of this longest, darkest year, we look in longing for light.
The light of the internet blares the truth my spirit has already sensed. According to Google, the sun rises Thursday at 7:17 a.m. and sets at 4:20 p.m. Just nine hours of light, the fewest all year. The solstice. These hours of sunrise and sunset are the only things that haven’t changed — ever.
Light, the kind the universe offers, is a constant, just as the longing for it used to be this time of year.
Down through the ages, darkness has inspired solstice rituals celebrating light, Hanukkah being the best-known. Yet in our back-lit and brightly lit age, when light bursts from every phone, pen, or keychain, we have plenty of illumination, even on the solstice. But what about that other type of light?
On these winter nights, I like to stroll the neighborhood, bundled up and burrowing along. In house after house, light sets the stage. The footlights are each window’s sparkling Christmas jewels, but each full stage is lit by that flashing, dancing, blazing rectangle on one wall. Your average flat-screen, 30, 40, 50 inches across, can easily flood a string of Christmas lights. And this flat-screen light is the light of our age, the light that blinds, the light that diverts, and, this year at least, the light that has doused us with despair.
But when I walk past the neighborhoods, past the flash-lit front rooms, I come to a clearing. Even a block from the nearest street lights, the sky darkens. Standing a moment, shivering, letting the light of despair fade, I look up. And there … and there … and there is the light that once gave hope to a dark world.
Some might call it heaven. Until the 1600s it was widely believed that the universe was pure light and night just the earth’s shadow. Some might see this light as pure energy, the birth and evolution of stars and galaxies. Some see patterns, stories in the stars told by constellations. I try to see all three, because I was lucky.
I was lucky to have a mother who, at least once each December, turned off our living room’s rectangular light and took me outside. She is long gone but I hear her voice now, in the clearing, pointing to the December stars I still know by the names she taught me: Aldebaran. The Pleiades. And the three stars of Orion’s belt.
I taught the names to my children. Nate, when he was 4, already knew where to spot “the three Ryans.” And now here in the clearing, looking at this light — of heaven, of energy, of stories — I wish I could drag my neighbors off their floodlit stages. I would turn off the light of despair and bring them into this clearing. Because there … and there … and there is the light we need now. The light of a thousand stars and, if you find an especially dark clearing, of the Milky Way, its gauze draping the midnight regions of the sky.
Flat-screen light carries simple messages: Be afraid. Be suspicious. Buy things. But the light above, even on the darkest night of the shortest day, sings a different tune: Trust. Endure. Shine. Some say they feel insignificant in the face of this light. Funny, I feel that way when faced with flat screens. But face to face with the universe, I feel a part of something, something that has trusted, endured, shone since creation.
My wish for all this holiday, and for this coming year, is to see this light, to feel it, to be inspired by it as often as possible. Let that other light go dark.
Thanks, Mom. I still miss you. And I still know the stars. Aldebaran. The Pleiades. And of course, the three Ryans.
Bruce Watson, of Montague, is the author of the online magazine, The Attic — for a Kinder, Cooler America.