Dark Nights

We notice the shortening of days with a kind of shock when we lose daylight savings time in November.

Suddenly the Solstice arrives, Robert Frost’s “darkest evening of the year.” And later that week comes Christmas with its enduring symbol, the Star of Bethlehem.

Clear, cold December nights should spangle the dark skies with stars and the gleam of planets-- grandeur our forebears looked upwards into with fear and awe.

While they built fires for warmth and light. Maybe they hoped to press back the enormity of everything we are not. Everything we do not and cannot inhabit. The questions we cannot answer because our span of life is too short for such answers.

Today we fill the late December darkness with holiday activity. We rush about as though time were running out, when all that’s really accelerating is our pressure to fill that darkness.

And we do fill it, with sparkles on our clothes, winking lights on the tree, candles at church services. We have created rituals to lift and connect us, and also to obscure an unwelcome anxiety.

How lovely it is, indeed, to see old friends, old relatives and young ones. They provide a visible measurement of time’s passage that we wrap in sentiment and favorite foods, just as we switch on every light we can find to hold back the dark.

I’m in favor of artificial light, bright enough to read by. But I miss the stars. Not long ago, on a clear moonless night, we could greet Orion while standing in our front yard in Winedale. Not just Orion, either. The Pole Star and countless others created a texture to the otherwise dark sky.

Where have they gone? You know where. From my front yard now, I see the smudgy lights of Brenham. A friend toward Ledbetter sees the lights of Round Top.

Round Top, Pop. 99. Really? That charming small town is now pulsing with light visible from miles away?

Maybe there are commercial reasons. It’s true that year-round Christmas lights describe porch eaves on the shops around the square. Sleeves of seasonal white light envelop the nearby trees-at levels of brilliance that leave our town hall almost invisible behind them.

It’s a trend spilling over from the cities where post pandemic holiday extravaganzas of light fill parks and yards with an exuberance that feels almost desperate.

And not just in Texas. Santa Fe’s ancient plaza throbs with multicolored lights this year, as out of place as strobes in church.

We seem as dazzled by the excess as children seeing their first Christmas tree.

So dazzled we can’t see beyond it—and maybe that’s the point. We don’t want to look too far ahead.

If we did we’d see how much of the good stuff we are losing by this frantic embrace of technology on every side.

We’d notice how washing the night sky with light disturbs things we value about living in a rural community.

Confuses creatures like birds, butterflies, lightning bugs, possums, rabbits, coyotes, foxes.

Erases stars from sight. Newcomers can be cavalier about that. If they come from the city, they haven’t seen stars for a long time. Not the cascade of stars we once saw regularly.

And we need those stars. We need that feeling of the limitless universe above us that makes us feel so small. So insignificant. So threatened.

We need an antidote to hubris. Because when we human beings get too full of ourselves, we cause harm that spills into the innocent world around us.

Which is everything we see and smell and touch that isn’t us.