Why I adore the night
At this time each year I read Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why I Adore the Night’. It’s about the nighttime and darkness, but also about winter, the season of ‘nighttime’.
Living in our electric light masks what’s going on as the season changes. It’s tempting to just carry on, one season to the next, without changing how we live and how we practice.
When I plan my year, I plan it in four blocks of three months each. Spring, summer, autumn and winter each have their own vibe. I start my plan with a set of keywords, intentions if you like. So whereas spring might have the words, productive, travelling, social, and creative. Winter, the season we are now entering, has the words dreamtime, nourishment, fire, and digesting.
Every season has its own unique qualities. Each is an opportunity for practising in a different way. Our lives and dharma practice are not happening in a vacuum. Being sensitive to the world around us is to be open to the wisdom that exists there. If you like, ‘the world is telling us how to practice, can we listen?
"Jeanette Winterson - Cambridge 2010" by Chris Boland
Why I adore the night
by Jeanette Winterson
It's human to want light and warmth. Our pagan ancestors had a calendar of fire festivals, and God's first recorded words, according to the Hebrew Bible, were: "Let there be light." Night belongs to the dark side, literally and metaphorically: ghosts, scary monsters, robbers, the unknown. Electricity's triumph over the night keeps us safer as well as busier.
But whatever extends the day loses us the dark.
We now live in a fast-moving, fully lit world where night still happens, but is optional to experience. Our 24/7 culture has phased out the night. In fact we treat the night like failed daylight. Yet slowness and silence – the different rhythm of the night – are a necessary correction to the day.
I think we should stop being night-resisters, and learn to celebrate the changes of the seasons, and realign ourselves to autumn and winter, not just turn up the heating, leave the lights on and moan a lot.
Night and dark are good for us. As the nights lengthen, it's time to reopen the dreaming space. Have you ever spent an evening without electric light?
I don’t mean the cliché of a candlelit dinner, with the light switch just nearby, or the shock-horror of a powercut; I mean choosing real all-night darkness as an alternative to artificial light.
It doesn’t matter whether you are in the city or the country, as long as you can control your own little pod. Make it a weekend, get in plenty of candles, and lay the fire if you have one. Prepare dinner ahead, and take a walk that ends towards sunset, so that you are heading for home in that lovely liminal time, where light and dark are hinged against each other.
City or country, that sundown hour is strange and exhilarating, as ordinary spatial relations are altered; trees rear up in their own shadows, buildings bulk out, pavements stretch forward, the red wrapper of brake lights turns a road into a lava-flow.
Inside, the lights are going on. Outside, it’s getting dark. You, as a dark shape in a darkening world, want to hold that intimacy, just for one night. Go home. Leave the lights off.
