Solstice light

Leaning into the dark and the quiet.

Saturday. It’s morning. Pink and blue filled the air for few minutes at first light as I lay watching from my bed, Acre curled by my feet, also looking out the window. The pink arched up in the south facing window, a band all the way across to the western horizon, but then quickly faded in the December gray and quiet. Acre eventually crawled up next to me to ask for breakfast. After a few minutes of those blue eyes staring at me, straight into my face as he lays his head on my chest, how I am supposed to say no. Dogs have us figured out.

It’s the darkest day of the year. I think in many southern areas there isn’t a lot of understanding of how this affects people. And even up north, where it definitely affects us all, there is still denial of the power of light on the human being. We like to pretend it isn’t. We like to think that by pretending it doesn’t it somehow makes us stronger. But the simple truth as far as I see it, is there is no avoiding the affects of low light on the human being. We move slower. We move less. We likely sleep more, and certainly our biology is asking us to. I also have a poorly researched theory based completely on experience, which is, LED lights do nothing to help our minds, whereas incandescent bulbs seem to have a genuine warming affect on the brain that spreads through the body. Ever since the slow transfer began years ago, I feel more and more like LED does not satiate the desire for warm light I crave. A fire place does. Even the warm halogens in the overheads. But the LED, no matter the technical temperature, does not. So we build fires. We light candles. We exist more in dim lights. Winter in the north is a beautiful thing, even if darker.

And the low sunlight does something to the colors, at least when not blocked by low clouds.

How this light affects the brain and body is still a mystery to me. I’m sure Huberman has explained it, but knowledge of the chemistry does not touch on what is happening internally. I know a lot of people that call it seasonal depression. For me it is not a depression in the “mentally down” sense, but in the sense that my overall senses are dampened, quieted, and pulled further inward to a center of my mind and body to that place that feels like it is the core of us, in there, its like a cave I tend to retreat towards. When I think “depression” I think sadness, but this isn’t a sadness. This is a quiet. Perhaps it’s linked to our genes, in winter, when light is low, when plants are dead or dormant, when snow covers the landscape, when the human is more vulnerable to the conditions and starvation, we retreat into still and quiet. We are alert because we do not hibernate, but we stay closer to home, at least in state of mind.

And I’ve learned to enjoy it. I crave more sun. I love being out in the snow. But there is no doubt there is this sense of protectiveness in the winter. Of preservation.

And I feel that way of light. My mind clings to any direct shine there is. And again, I think this is instinctual. It is not without pertinence the way the human body is equipped to interpret the tiniest speck of light even at great distance, even through dense trees, we are made to perceive what is only a tiny speck of light in the darkness. We see it and hold to it. It becomes a direction, even if we are not walking towards it.

Walking in the darkest of nights in the winter my eyes feel wildly alert. In terms of aperture they are wide open. And where they leave off my ears are alert. My head moves slowly through the cold winter air, back and forth. That sound. There is an owl just a few hundred yards away, up high in that dense ponderosa stand. I can barely make out where the limbs reach into the sky. There are faint clouds, but only directly overhead where the dark clouds break open. Somehow the deep space directly above, where just a handful of stars sparkle through, it all seems so much brighter than everything else. To the north, in the direction of the owl, the clouds hang low, dense, and black… Even when my eyes are adjusted, it is just darkness. My feet know the steps of this trail from a thousand walks like this, but my mind still stays alert, knowing my eyes and ears are limited in this darkness.

I always imagine there is likely a mountain lion near bye. This is the Rattlesnake valley. A mountain lion is likely very close by.

A little snow sort of rain starts to fall. I can hear it tapping on my pulled up hood. Down by the creek the water is moving slowly, viscous with cold.

These quiet, dark months for the mind, do they exist in Arizona or do things just carry on normal? I’ve never spent the winter anywhere south. Is this a northern cultural experience? I imagine that this is the sort of thing that very directly affects culture, especially in days when people were far less mobile. Humans have always moved about, but not nearly to the extent now. Only in the last hundred years have we mastered moving more than one time zone in a single day. That alone has drastically changed the way we interact with our landscape, and how the landscape interacts with us. I’ve flown enough to know that once you cross just a few time zones it affects you. It confuses the body.

There is a part of me that wonders if living somewhere south of here would be good. But ultimately, Montana has shaped me. I’ve learned to embrace this dark similar to embracing the cold creek I sit in every morning. Why is it?

There is a mystery about the dark. An unsolvable mystery. It is in part the darkness of the winter night, and in part the shadows or dark in the mind. They are connected. As a human we tend to want to shine a light on everything, figure everything out, think we can understand it all, think we need to understand it all. But in darkness sits mystery, and ultimately the universe is full of mystery. And I think that is very much what draws me into winter, into the night, into dark corners of the forest off trail. There is something exciting about entering the unknown. There is something exciting about pushing yourself into places where you can not see or understand everything. And that for me is part of what I love about winter. Add to it a natural quieting of the mind and body. Both work differently in the winter than they do in the summer. And once I learned to not fight it, to just enjoy the quieting, to embrace the slower pace, acknowledging it is not only alright to do less, but that I see more when I do so, it opened my eyes to a new level of seeing the world, at a pace not available in the long days of summer when the mind, body, and landscape are all charged by incredibly long hours of sunlight. This waxing and waning of solar energy has a drastic affect on how we interact and see the world. That is what I’m drawn to in seasons, and the shift they require of us.

It’s Sunday now. I meant to have this piece done last night, but ended up walking further than expected. The rain, the creek. I was wishing for snow, but this part of western Montana often plays with rain in December. In the dark walk I could a few others down towards the bridge that crosses the creek. On the solstice it’s not uncommon to see people out in the dark. We used to always bring our kids out on a night walk in the dark. There is a magic in knowing it is the shortest and darkest day. And an optimism. An optimism in knowing that even in this level of dark there is beauty and that it only gets brighter from here. We made it, sort of thing.

Down the trail you see Christmas lights sparkling through the trees, over and up the ridge line. Little lights scattered about in the dark. No stars tonight. The rain slowly freezing now, turning white as it falls. Slowly shifting towards snow.

It’s Sunday morning early, and my dog is nuzzled into bed to get out when I do in the drifting dark. I pull on my socks quietly, and go downstairs. The house is still quiet. I pull on my fleece pants and down jacket, hat and gloves, grab a towel, and ride in the dark up the trail, up the creek. The ground is wet, but frozen, and slick. I hobble down to the creek edge and walk downstream to where there is a deep spot. Here I strip down and jump in. The air is very cold, and the creek shocks my skin as I sink into it. I take a breath and lay flat underwater until my forehead can’t take it anymore, then I come back up and sit, just quiet. Initially there is an instinct to take a big breath, but I hold it, slowly, breathing, and my body remembers it can be calm in this. I sit a few minutes in the dark, in the cold. Slowly I see light in the east through the trees. Slowly my mind starts to wake. Slowly I start to feel the cold take hold in the river around me.

I’m in the water for a few minutes before I get out and towel off. Once out, I’m not cold, even if the air is freezing. I’m steaming. I dry off slowly, and slowly get back in my layers. The creek at this hour is so peaceful. A deer has been standing across the bank keeping tabs of me. After I get out, he walks down the far bank into the shadows and disappears. As the light continues is quiet growth, more birds are out. There are two mallards up in the pool above me. A flock of geese land in the field just to my west. My toes are cold, and now it begins to hit my body that I’m entirely cold. A shiver takes hold. I sit down on the bank though, I want to watch it grow light here with these sounds. The creek. The birds. The slight wind through naked tree branches. It is early and there aren’t any humans out yet. This is a quiet morning in the woods.

Today will be a few minutes longer than yesterday, but by barely anything. Winter will start taking hold soon. While we often get rain in December, it very quickly can turn cold, and the shift knows to take place now. These seasons are amazing to watch when you realize their patterns. Never exactly the same, but always in sync.

Back home now, the house still quiet, and coffee.

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I’ve been writing on here for about a year with regularity now. I’m still not exactly sure what I’m writing about, but I’ve really enjoyed the community and support here. Thank you for taking the time to read, and so glad to have you all here to share this. Writing for me is inquiry, and while I have many larger writing projects in the works, some complete, some in infancy, here I write with a different intention. It’s sort of an investigation into what and how I see the world and the way I interact with it. That is pretty open ended I realize. I initially told myself it was a place to warm up my mind and hands for my other writing, and it is that, but it’s become more. As more people have joined I realized that this inquiry is dive into the world we share. So I just want to say thank you for joining. Cheers to the winter. Cheers to the dark, the cold and the snow. (And the sunshine and longer days for those of you that are further south… this to me is wildly intriguing, though I think I’m attached to the dark.)