night

Night is a wondrous thing.

It does all the things that we humans cannot; it slithers and slides, crawls and creeps, seeping and welcoming without consequence or thought. It makes the unattractive mysterious, and things silly in the light find homes at night. I love the night.

I was born 5 minutes before midnight, and it seems like I’ve been pushing off morning light ever since. If I had my druthers, I would sleep all day, live my life at night, and never think twice. Night is home for me, in a way that daylight really never has been. Night calls to my darker aspects like a favored, well-recalled lover. I can find shadows to hide in, my flaws disperse, and all things are possible with the right whisper at the right moment.

Life doesn’t seem as difficult at night, either. Stoplights are brighter, which is good, as my foot is heavier. There’s a balance between my sleepiness and the jolt of espresso. I have no gods to answer to, and my life seems a bit more under my own control.

The only fly in my lusciously dark ointment lies in the fact that I can’t live my life in the dark – not and be completely healthy. It’s medical fact that human skin produces vitamin D in sunlight, much like plants produce chlorophyll. Vitamin D, in turn, makes our livers happy, regulates our calcium and phosphorous, makes our bones happy, and even enhances our autoimmune system. I could live without happy bones, but as a woman with osteoporosis looming in a few years, that might not be the best idea. In other words, I have to have light and dark to be a happy li’l organism…, which sucks, because living in the dark is so much more attractive.

It’s easier and lovelier in the dark to see things as we wish them to be, too. Idolatry is sexier when called addiction, and addictions can be glossed over as understandable the next morning. It’s not comfortable, or attractive to say such things about a stated, certified medical conditions, but then… waking up to some poor one-night stand decisions can be all too un-fun, too. And truth only stings when it’s supposed to.

Winter seems a longer, lovelier night for me. It chills and chafes my skin, making my cheeks pink and my soul want to nestle into soft, warm places full of comforting weight and soothing, familiar smells. Winter lies out in my mind, lush and dark, like a robust red wine and sirloin dinner on velvet tablecloths, or a delicate whipped cream island floating on a sea of espresso. Instinct clutches, slithering the thought that night lasts longer in winter, that needs become darker, more demanding, and that light, light even as small as a Christmas light, cuts sharp and clean and eternal in a winter sky.

It seems somewhat cliche to think of the less wise, darker periods of my life as winters, but I’ve yet to find anything else that fits as well or as appropriately. Winter is a bare, stark time, with muddied skies of light and dread, even in the brightest parts of the earth. It is that in-between time, when the golden harvests have been reaped, and the green light of spring still sleeps. It is the hallway between the recently closed door and the soon-to-be-opened window promised by the Divine, and should be seen as such – a gift of time and period where there is no reason not to take advantage of not being able to do anything.

 In her book, “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom,” Dr. Christine Northrup  suggests that all human beings have not only monthly cycles, but annual ones, too. She presents the idea that we all want to rest and nestle in the winter, that we most strongly long for companionship and warmth in the midst of the cold, and that we, through nature or nurture, hook or crook, withdraw into our selves a bit more when the nights grow longer. We are less eager to be social, but more inclined to do all the good we can. We hunker down for the long winter nights, with our kerchiefs and caps, dreaming of sugarplums, granted, but hoping more for the yellow sunshine and green carpet of growth that comes so obviously with spring, seemingly unaware of anything changing under our personal blankets of snow. We dream, we grow, we live in dark, mysterious ways - at night.