Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
The sun set today, and we’ll not see it again for three months, not until its return on the 6th of February. Actually we didn’t even get to see it today as it was an overcast day, a dull windy day that was better suited for fall than for November.
It is hard to convey to most of my friends that the dark season is not as overbearing as it would seem on the surface. I don’t mind it at all actually. We get a lot of light at both ends of the season, even if we don’t see the sun it is just below the horizon for much of the day for at least part of it. We probably only get to see 24 hour starlight for two or three weeks. We get a lot of twilight, and I really love the blues and blacks that paint the sky through out much of our lingering light.
The darkest time of the year is also one of the busiest. The Christmas season is filled with lots of things to occupy the mind and body, including two or three weeks of nightly community games and dancing. By the time they are over the light is rapidly lengthening and one begins to look forward to the coming of the sun.
I get very rankled when I read certain writers describe the setting of the sun as though a curtain of darkness falls over the land for three (or however many) months. I’m not sure why they do it, perhaps it is to make their experience in the dark season seem all the more impressive. I relish the fact that I live where the sun is gone for three months and never sets for another three months. It is an experience that few people get to have. I remember well the eyes of the children of the schools we would visit in Cuba when I explain where I come from, and sun and the cold. It is like they are listening to someone from another planet. And I love the light, and all of its changes and subtleties, how the landscape changes almost daily
The lines of the poem at the beginning and end of this piece are the opening and closing lines of the poem Praise Song by Barbara Crooker. I praise this world filled with wonder, and all of the experiences our natural world holds for me.
Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
Comments
5 responses
Twilight is to me the finest time of the day and to stretch it to weeks sounds fairly wonderful (at least if you had the time to prop-up your feet with a good book(s) and tea at hand). The two-three weeks of community games during the darkest time caught my attention. Was this true of Arctic cultures before the arrival of Europeans? I suppose an anthropologist somewhere has looked at winter solstice celebrations from the perspective of night length and other environmental factors.
Thankfully, this particular part of the natural world has you to write about it, appreciate it, and convey it’s beauty to us.
I would dearly love to spend a year in your corner of the world.. or more. Twilight has always been my favorite time of the day/night & I think I could adapt to that mood quite easily.
Here in Bergen there are only a few days a year where the sun never crosses the horizon, but with the constant rain that sets in around October (and doesn’t let up until April) the winters really do feel like a ‘curtain of darkness’ has fallen over the city. Its in the summer, when the skies never go dark, that I get to appreciate living in the North.
Keep telling us about how great the darkness is. I find that I get moody and depressed as the sun spends less and less time in the sky in November. I will perk up a lot when it snows but the greys of November are just not for me. I want to sleep it all away until the snow comes.