The Longest Night
Here in the northern hemisphere, in the cold climes of Canada, the light is reborn at 10:27pm on Thursday December 21. That means that tonight is the longest night. The darkest before the dawn. Into this nigredo, the ‘dark night of the soul’ in Jungian parlance, we project all our fears, enemies, disdain, and distaste. We shiver in the cold and the dark and pray that the light will return. For too many, this is literal and not metaphorical. On the Advent wreath, into this third week, we burn the pink candle of hope.
I had a teacher that spoke of this time as the ‘sweet spot’. On a tennis racket, this is the place of ultimate tension. The exquisite tension between the horizontal and vertical strings. The place, not necessarily at the centre, where the greatest bounce is achieved with the minimal amount of effort. The place where too much will snap us and too little will deflate us. This speaks to more than the charges on our credit cards or the presents under the tree. As we sit in the dark, as we wait for the light, as we bide our time between symptom and diagnosis, this sweet spot analogy bears remembering.
In the dark, in the unconscious, both collective and personal, we are told that all things are united. Jung called this uroboric. The snake that eats its own tail. The singularity that has not achieved entropy. Consciousness is what creates polarity. Consciousness is what illuminates the multiplicity. As soon as the light of consciousness dawns, differentiation and clarity creates the day and the night, the light and the dark. More often than not, the us and them. The right and wrong. The acceptable and the unacceptable. Yesterday, in a discussion about time, someone told me that when the primordial force we name as God or Creator divided the light from the dark, time was born. “What is time?”, I asked. “Time is the measure of change”. I loved that! Without time, without the division of our hours, our days, our seasons, our generations, how would we perceive change? Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow? Oh, but how we resist change. How we dig in our heels, cement our positions, and lob word grenades into our keyboards or slogans into our megaphones. How hard it is to welcome the stranger, consider the novel, or receive the unknown.
The one constant in creation is change. I once sat out on the Land at Six Nations and did a Vision Quest. For three nights and four days, I sat in a circle of prayer ties and fasted. I ‘cried for a vision’ in the traditions of my hosts and my forebearers. No food and no water, under the dehydrating sun of August, I sat. The first thing I met was my thirst. In fact, I became thirst. There was nothing else. Hunger paled against the intensity of thirst. My suffering was real. My fear palatable. My terror familiar.
On the third night, as I sat and prayed, as I watched the pitch dark yield ever so softly to the quickening of day, I received my vision. Simple. Profound. Just before the darkness yields, just before the new day is born, the grass weeps. Green blades release moisture as the dew drops both mourn the end of the night and herald the beginning of the day. This was holy water. Unbidden. Unexpected. Not to be consumed no matter how thirsty I was. This living water held a fragile promise against the despair and agony of my thirst. This was my sweet spot. Felt. Known. I touched, experienced the full awareness of my longing against an unexpected promise of joy. I continued to thirst, I continued my fast for another 7 hours. But, on that grass, within the cosmos that held me, in the centre and circumference of my being, I found my unassailable sweet spot.
In my fairy tale classes we were discussing magic. One student so aptly defined magic as the exquisite knowledge and attunement to the patterns of nature. I loved this! For some 50 years I was unconscious to the magic of dew drops. I had not noticed. I was not paying attention. But, because I slowed down, or was slowed down by my vision quest, because I sat with the moment, contained and held my hunger and my thirst, I witnessed a miracle. A miracle hidden in plain sight. For those with ears to hear and eyes to see, the world is enchanted. The light always returns. The longest night always yields. Change is constant. God will change the course of my life.
Tonight, the Solstice candles will flicker and the darkest fears will rise. If we are conscious, the strangers we would rather not welcome in will tap upon the borders of our understanding. I invite you to welcome in the strange, welcome in the stranger. Open your heart and offer up your finest bread and wine. Like the ancient Baucis and Philemon, entertain the gods that have been forgotten. Find a room in the Inn of your understanding or the manger of your heart.
Jung said that “god is the name by which I designate all things which cross my path violently and recklessly, all things which alter my plans and intentions, and change the course of my life, for better or worse.”
There is no better time to peer into the darkness than tonight.