I’ve been thinking about my past polarity of day and night, possibly because in these times the two seem to blur together into one continuous event with no clear edges.
I go to bed thinking “Wasn’t I just here five minutes ago?”
I wake up thinking “Wasn’t I just here five minutes ago?
I know the delineations will eventually clarify as society reopens and we all fan out into our normal patterns of visiting restaurants, museums, music venues, fill-in-the-blank favorite activities once more. We will return to the rhythm — 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. will once again be day, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. evening, 8 p.m. to midnight night, and midnight to 7 a.m. the wee hours.
In the meantime, I’ve noticed a difference in how I feel within the two clear halves of our 24-hour cycle: light and dark.
It used to be, at least for me, that I was so busy “doing” during the day that I didn’t spend a lot of time synthesizing problems or addressing worries beyond the work at hand. Those tasks were reserved for the night, when all the worries of the world would enter the boxing ring of my anxiety. No matter how much I thrashed around with them, I rarely won the match. For many years just the thought of going to bed each night gave me anxiety.
But, among the many strange turns of this year, one is this clear circadian change:
Despite my insomnia, night has become a haven. Rather than a place to avoid, the darkness has become a thing to disappear into, a thing to wrap myself up in. I find I have stopped trying to save the world at night, instead letting the night save me.
Of course the realization of this shift arrived on a walk, as do most things on this blog.
Yesterday, rather than my regular morning hike, Posie and I decided to amble around the lake by night. By the end of the walk I realized that I hadn’t looked down at my feet once in three miles – odd considering these are the same feet I can’t seem to keep my eyes off when I am walking in daylight. I should note that my habit of ground gazing has gotten significantly worse since my glorious four-facture face-plant a few years ago on the streets of Paris. Generally when I walk I am ridiculously vigilant, scanning the ground for any root, rock, or, in the case of Paris, cobblestone, laying in wait.
And yet, last night my eyes floated comfortably forward, drawn to the barely visible gray-black curve of the path several hundred yards in front of me, and the ebony outlines of trees to either side. My gait swung freely, my stride elongated, my breathing deepened. I did not look over my shoulder for attackers – the ones movies, books, and my martial arts classes have assured me are waiting in the dark. My fight or flight turned off. I tuned in to the air and sounds and varying shades of color lights popping through the black and gray trees. I even closed my eyes for a bit and felt something close to meditative energy flow along my pumping limbs.
Posie too seemed to feel a sense of ease in the night. Where she is apt to charge off into the bushes by day, during this night walk she stayed perfectly aligned at my side. Three large dogs passed us on the path and she didn’t so much as growl.
In my imagination I saw myself easing through the crisp night air like a seal slipping through water. Posie was the seal pup beside me. And from the far corners of my college memory a line from a William Wordsworth poem swam to the surface:
How beautiful the Queen of Night . . .
The last time I walked alone at night, many months ago now, there was none of this ease. I was jumpy, vigilant to strangers passing by, and, unable to see my feet on the lakeside path, I instead moved up to the brightly lit sidewalk. I practically ran to get the walk over with.
So something has and continues to change in my understanding of day and night, light and dark. It is not lost on me that the shift in my internal relationship with day and night has been happening within the context of our nation’s – and my personal – racist reckoning. Embracing the night, for me, is part and parcel of changing my/our dangerous worldview: the belief that light is good and darkness is bad.
When I was a child, monsters lived under the bed and at dusk bad humans lurked around every corner. These beliefs were affirmed by parents determined to scare safety into me, by news stories and scary books, by the cheesy horror flicks my parents didn’t know we watched, and by the fact that my parents triple-checked the door locks at night. Darkness, all these messages affirmed, was the medium of evil.
Add to that the pervasive cultural metaphor that slates light against dark: white represents good, black bad. The Jesus of my childhood wore white, the devil wore black. Glinda the Good Witch wore white, the Wicked Witch of the West black. Angels wear white – heaven is light and soft. Hell is dark and hard. Light is clean, dark is dirty.
Did you know that most crime happens not in the deep of the night but during daylight hours?
Day over night, light over dark, white over black. In a world where we fear the night, I wonder if I am seeing some part — a mere pebble on the beach of racism — of my own bigotry. Fear of the dark is fear of not knowing, which is fear of not trusting, which is fear of otherness.
Isn’t this how prejudice works? Racism is a many tentacled monster and I am not so naive as to suggest that a white woman’s fear of the dark is the root of her racism. But my night walk has me thinking and asking questions. Is it possible that in wrestling through the 20,000 nights I’ve lived, my fear of the dark fanned out beyond the night sky into the pigment of skin?
Walking gently, easily, and without fear through the darkness with Posie, I understand that part of deactivating the discriminator is actively embracing the night. I know it is a drop in an enormous bucket of bigotry that exists in and around me. Still, I hope that my letting go into darkness, looking up in confidence rather than down in fear, helps me in some small way to rewrite the black-white, good-evil paradigm that I was handed in childhood, that I have continued to carry in adulthood, and which is so pervasive in our society.
Looking up rather than down at my feet, trusting the darkness to carry me safely, feeling the shadows of the night cloak both Posie and I in their cool embrace, I hope we are getting there.
How beautiful the Queen of Night, on high
Her way pursuing among scattered clouds,
Where, ever and anon, her head she shrouds
Hidden from view in dense obscurity.
But look, and to the watchful eye
A brightening edge will indicate that soon
We shall behold the struggling Moon
Break forth, again to walk the clear blue sky.
~William Wordsworth
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