Darkness, Darkness

A Chilly Morning Walk

In many religious systems, the darkness of night is a symbol of evil; the brighter light of day a symbol of good. Perfect imagery for the bifurcated country we live in right now because many of the political and cultural issues we face use the same dichotomous scaffold. For example, we might see law enforcement as essentially good or law enforcement as essentially evil. [Hint: that’s a theme of my upcoming memoir.] Or, for me, who believes Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state, I have been devastated by insinuations and outright claims that that nation is“evil.” Now we’re in this complicated and multi-faceted war in Iran. I’ve heard it said that if you tell me who an individual voted for as president in 2024, you can tell which side they will take – for or against—this war.

But the world is complicated. The human mind, the human heart are limited, and we have a difficult time overcoming the strictures of our understandings… in the best of times. And these aren’t the best of times.

Don’t be disturbed: I’m not going over to the “dark side,” whatever that may be for you. Anyone who knows me personally, knows that I have strong beliefs and opinions. Seeing nuance, listening to the thoughts of others does not mean you believe in moral relativity, but I do try to listen with open ears, read with wide eyes, acknowledge the existence of the other, evaluate with intelligence and empathy. It is so hard to write without offending or sounding arrogant, but I wondered if there might be a parable hidden in my own new-found understanding of “darkness.”

When I directed preschools, there were two days my teachers and I dreaded: the first was the day after Halloween, when tired, still over-hyped goblins inhabited the normally lively and amusing bodies of our three-and-four-year olds. The second was the Monday after the clock changed to Daylight Savings Time, when these same little darlings, along with their parents, had had to get up an hour earlier than they had done for the past six months. It often took them a week to get over their exhaustion and crankiness.

The garb of my winter morning walk

I was surprised yesterday, the first Monday after the first Sunday of PDT that I was grateful the clocks had sprung forward. Even though I’m retired, I do join a Zoom writing group at 7a.m. five days a week, so I woke up at what would have been 5 a.m. only two days ago.

I usually take a quick walk first thing in the morning to rouse my brain and stiff body before I sit down at my computer. All fall and winter, I’ve come to love being outside in the darkness right before dawn.

Prior to these walks, I’ve rarely been out alone in the night. When did I first learn never to go out by myself after the sun went down? When I was fifteen? Twenty? “Take Back the Night” began as a slogan and movement in the 1970’s, asserting women should be as safe as men in the nighttime, but I didn’t trust this (unlikely) premise. And I never had to work in restaurants like my daughter who, for several years, rode her bike home through the Boston streets at 3 a.m. Or do shift work like doctors and police women and 7/11 workers. If I was out by myself in the evening, I was in a car, usually with my husband or a friend.

I live by a busy street that connects the smaller city of Lakewood to Tacoma. There are traffic and street lights, but at 6:30 a.m. Standard Time in mid-winter, it is a dark out. I know I’m safe enough as the drivers hurry by on their way to work, school buses hum up the hill, but I can still enjoy the shadowy lack of color of the early morning, the feeling of being enveloped in black.

Walking in that darkness is calming, meditative. But, of course, as spring approaches, the sky streaks with soft light earlier and earlier. That’s why, when we rolled back the clocks ,and I got a few more weeks of darkness, I was thrilled.

My birthday, June 22, usually falls a day or two after the summer solstice. By then, in the Pacific Northwest, we will have almost sixteen hours of daylight. As songwriter Eric Anderson wrote in the sixties, I’ll get to “…watch the no colors fade blazing into petal shades of violets of dawn” over the tree-line to the east. And that will be amazing too, provide a different sense of calm. But I may be longing for the darker days of winter. We’ll see.

I’m an optimist, but I don’t expect the world to be a fairer, better, more peaceful place in those three months leading up to the solstice. My only hope is that, if I remain calm myself, I may be able to make my corner of it a little more reasonable, encourage a person here or there, not to see the world as I see it, but to be able to see the world through my eyes…and allow me to see their world through theirs. To be able to mend some of the gashes in our country, because I don’t think, in the long run, we can survive or prosper hating each other as we do now.

I was originally going to link the Youngblood song, “Darkness, Darkness” to this piece. But, as I listened both to original and many covers – Robert Plant, Ann Wilson among others— I remembered another famous song by that group: “Love is but a song we sing, fear’s the way we die.” There’s even a sixties image attached to this You Tube—hundreds of young people forming a peace sign on a California beach:

Jesse Colin Young, lead singer of the Youngbloods, died only a year ago, March 2025. In 2019, still performing he said, “I feel like my country needs me to speak up. Every voice that speaks for love should come out and speak.”

I am an activist at heart. Even in the sixties, I wasn’t a flower-child idealist, and I’ve been tempered by life, for sure, and have seen too much scarring of our world since those hopeful days when I was young to be an idealist. There is no Kumbaya solution to the anger in our country. Maybe were as torn apart in 1960’s, early 70’s as we are now. The horrible political realities of Vietnam then; the cultural divide caused by sex, drugs and rock and roll. I don’t know. There’s always been evil, that’s for sure, and good.

Sometimes it’s nice to imagine we could wave a “love-magic-wand” and turn the world into a lovin’ place. You know, “Take all of the guns and watch them explode into space.” Maybe what might help a bit is to be able to see each other’s pain from different angles.