still in the darkness

Tonight I’ll keep a fire burning until dawn.

Which actually requires a lot of wood, and I always underestimate how many smaller pieces and kindling sticks I’ll need, so there was I was at 10:30 PM on Yoolis Night, splitting logs and listening to Alexander Shaia talking about Advent and the Solstice and darkness, and he kind of low-key blew my mind.

Here’s the thing about literal darkness: it’s not bad. It’s not evil. It can be scary, and it may not be your own personal preference, but it’s as much a part of life as the light, and this is such a childishly obvious fact and yet...

We forget it. We forget it all the time.

As a culture, we don’t like the dark. We try to erase it wherever we set ourselves up. Even when it’s dark, for so many of us it never truly is. How many of us have never seen more than a few stars at a time? How many of us have no idea what the night sky actually looks like?

What is it doing to us, to have lost that?

The Winter Solstice is a time of great joy because it’s the beginning of a new year and a turning back toward growth and life—but not right away. The Solstice is the threshold, but on that threshold we pause. The sun is stationary on the horizon, and will be for approximately three days. The sun is still.

This Solstice isn’t YAY IT’LL BE LIGHT AGAIN SOON. This Solstice is a celebration of that stillness, an invitation to pause and dwell in the darkness and not be impatient or afraid. At the Solstice, we light candles and decorate trees and keep fires burning not because the darkness is something to dread or to beat back but because the darkness is holy, and light is how we celebrate its holiness.

Shaia said that we light candles not to negate the darkness but to adorn it.

In other words: with light we glorify the darkness.

More than once in the last few nights, I’ve caught myself sitting in the darkened living room, turning on the power strip into which the Christmas is plugged. Turning it off. Turning it back on. Turning it off. Back on. Not because of the darkness, not because of the illuminated tree, but because of those enchanted split seconds when the tree lights first switch on and the darkness and the light meet, when in some indescribable way they seem to intertwine.

Even our tree itself reflects this. I mentioned on Twitter a few days ago that this tree has boughs that sit at an unusually sharp upward angle, obscuring a lot of the lights. The tree itself is as much darkness as it is light.

At first I wasn’t sure I was wild about that. Now I feel differently.

With darkness we glorify the light.

May you glorify your darkness on this blessed night, and may your darkness glorify your light.