Embracing the Long Night
To go into the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark, go without sight.
And find that the dark too blooms and sings
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
—Wendell Berry
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re tiptoeing up to the winter solstice. December 21 will be the longest night of the year in what feels like the longest year in recent memory.
This has been an important day, a holy day, since humans have had the ability to track the seasons and create metaphor. It’s a time of the death and rebirth of gods, of the sun, of the year. A time of feasting, of sacrifice, of deep ritual.
It’s a time of quiet and reflection.
We have a tendency (partially evolutionary, I’m sure) to equate darkness and long nights with depression, fear and mourning. We want to gather close to the warmth and light of the fire and look outward for glowing eyes in the trees. For anyone who’s heard a screech owl in the middle of the night alone in a forest, it’s easily understandable.
Today, let’s look at the idea of the long night as the long, quiet, still pause.
The holiday season culminates in a pause (in a year of pause, no less). Can this time of pause, of reset, of reflection, benefit us and our work? Can we justify pause and reflection in a time of so much injustice?
Yes. The answer to the first question is self-evident. The second? We live in a time where many feel guilty for being happy or resting. Others want to shame us for it. I argue that, unless we pause and reflect and rest, we cannot make space for our selves and our minds — and if we can’t make space for ourselves, we can’t hold space for others.
The Buddhist teacher Wendy Egyoku Nakao Roshi wrote more eloquently than I ever could of this in her piece “Hold to the Center” for Tricycle Magazine.
“In a world of instability, where is shelter to be found? … a place of emptiness and profound silence, a place of the deepest rest where self-interest has not yet entered. This is not a void, but rather a darkness where things are not yet differentiated or seen. You yourself can go to the darkness and become like an empty vessel, empty of points of view and preferences. An empty vessel refuses nothing and receives everything that is coming at it from all directions. By practicing in this way, you can create more space to accommodate your own reactivity and the points of view of others. “
This long night, this reflection empowers us to carve out space in order that we might share it with others. We can deepen our understanding of what has happened, what we want to make happen and, perhaps most importantly, where our hearts are in this eternal present moment.
This kind of reflection is deep, but it isn’t all peaceful. This is not an opportunity for spiritual or artistic bypassing.
The act of creation can only be a product of a deep reflection and an act of divining — of absorbing and synthesizing our restless, cataclysmic time and place and bringing forth from within ourselves the actual embodiment of it in art. Deep art from the deep self.
What we find there may be unnamable. It may defy all taxonomy and be only understood in feeling.
The writer Joy Williams told the Paris Review,
“I do believe there is, in fact, a mystery to the whole enterprise that one dares to investigate at peril … There’s a word in German, sehnsucht. No English equivalent, which is often the case. It means the longing for something that cannot be expressed, or inconsolable longing. There’s a word in Welsh, hwyl, for which we also have no match. Again, it is longing, a longing of the spirit.”
There’s a reason our long nights have been met with ritual for millennia. They connect us to something larger than ourselves — the seasons, the elements, the cosmos — while also reinforcing our interconnectedness. We must rely upon one another to make it through the harsh winter ahead.
The sculptor and performance artist Ana Mendieta said,
“My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant, from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate this world.”
There’s a lot we can reflect on in this long night. We have the long night of America itself, one I hope it is moving out of wiser and kinder and more just. We each have a personal year, scuffed and chipped with loss and little joys. We have our work, which is the synthesis of our physical, intellectual and emotional selves — where does it rest now, and where do we want it?
There is a list of words I jotted down between meetings as a guide for this piece. Process. Reflection. Rest. Not-Knowing. Bearing Witness. Absorption. Synthesis. Preparation.
These are the things I will embrace in this season. The things I will open the door to. Embrace them and sit with them. How can I better love Not-Knowing? Have I been Bearing Witness? What is my Preparation for?
Isamu Noguchi said, “It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness.” Cecilia Vicuña said that a great artist is made through “the art of learning to disregard what we think we ‘know,’ to discover what is really happening from the art itself.” TS Eliot wrote, “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning.”
This year, may our long night give meaning to our days. May we loosen our grip on certainty and open ourselves to discovery. May we embrace the end and the beginning and learn that they’re really part of the same long, long story.
