Shadowed

I’m sitting on the porch in a quiet space between late autumn storms that have pummeled the Pacific coast with wind and rain from the southwest. This morning at the Johnny Gunter place, the breeze hits the ridge rising to my right and eddies in from the northwest, bringing cool fingers of air that brush across my right cheek. Above the shaggy conifer shadows the overcast is ripped open like a child tearing paper off a long-awaited gift. Swaths of periwinkle blue promise a brief respite from the rain. My nose finds only wet needle-rot air waiting on another storm.

The silence seems pervasive. A sip of coffee opens my ears. Wind shushes like an easy river through big boughs on the ridgetop. A leaky roof gutter drops a rhythmic plop of water. Robin lands on a thin spindle of needles at the top of a Douglas-fir, balancing and chirruping as if to ask where everyone has gone. The storms of November have encouraged those who tend toward migration to get out of Dodge. Only the champions of hunkering are left to hunch against the wind and rain and narrowing window of daylight: elk, deer, bears, and bobcats. Salamanders, snakes, and lizards have retreated to a frost-free space below the surface. Bare hardwoods, brooding sword ferns, and needled firs weather the winter rooted to their place.

While autumn will always be my favorite season, this year a series of time deadlines breached the tipping point from an intensity of being to an intensity of doing. The intensity of doing required prioritizing things that probably won’t be necessary again in my lifetime, especially the dissolution of the family estate. The season before the rains also culminated in a phenomenal production of The Nature of Gratitude, a grateful variety program of music, poetry, prose, and photography. My collaborators are an astonishment of talent: Eric Alan, Laura DuBois, Melissa Hart, Jorah LaFleur, Beth Wood, Don Latarski, Halie Loren, and Daniel Gallo. Imagine all that artful attentiveness sharpened to a finely tuned point in the service of gratitude in its various forms. The outpouring of love and joy at our new venue, Unity of the Valley, was overwhelming.

All of this being and doing was carried forth on a tsunami of adrenaline whose width and amplitude was extraordinary. But waves are waves because they rise, peak, and recede. Over the years I’ve learned that the peak is transient. Train for a marathon, race, then rest. Climb a mountain, enjoy the view, then descend. Striving to remain constantly on top becomes destructive. So I built into my late November schedule a three-day retreat to my heart space in the Coast Range, where bigleaf maples cling to a few golden leaves, mosses are swollen with ample water, and conifers look on with somber green indifference to the ebb and flow of seasons.

Maybe it was the sheer volume of doing. The grief, relief, and gratitude of selling my childhood home. The remarkable rightness around The Nature of Gratitude. An election. An unprecedented bout of middle-of-the-night insomnia. Collapsing day length. A series of rainstorms that pounded all of the beings who reside here into winter submission. Surely there must be an “all of the above” choice? Regardless, I collapsed into an inward state of inertia. I used to call it “depression.” These days I refuse to dignify that dull internal condition in such ominous terms. In reality, it is a tripped breaker switch in need of resetting.

As of this morning I’ve had two quiet days and nights here. Reaching out to pull the near-winter morning inward, I ask my standard question a la Elizabeth Gilbert: “Love, what would you have me know?”

"Sweet child of the darkness, you might feel as though you are on the edge of a precipice teetering toward oblivion. But your vision of impending nothingness isn’t real. You are more than your emotions. They are the fickle accompaniment of vanishing light and changing seasons of life. You are hanging on; to sun-drenched summer, to October leaves yellowing and orange-ing through long weeks of sunshine. To things now past. Your feelings are real, but they are happening above a more fundamental truth. Let go. The storms have come to strip your world to its essence. This long darkness is your time, an incubator of self-discovery, the simmering pot of creativity you’ve been waiting for. You are here to thrive, like the shadowy fir and hemlock who gather the remaining light to make sugar in the spaces of their needles. It’s going to be a long damn time before the return of Light. Don’t wait. Darkness is your friend."

Winter Solstice is approaching. The damp air rings with calls for the return of Light. Humans abhor darkness. This makes sense. Our eyes are light-adapted organs with cells keenly attuned to a well-lit world. Impending nightfall reminds us of this truth. Have you been in the woods at dusk when pockets of shadow begin to intensify, and Cougar is felt but not seen? Have you returned in the morning to find their tracks in your boot prints? Our anthropocentric yearning for light is offset by an entourage of beings who thrive in the dark: Deer Mouse and Screech Owl, Giant Salamander and Flying Squirrel, Spotted Skunk and Black-tailed Deer. The reach of darkness in a winter forest is their time to shine. People retreat, circle close to the fire, and watch their eye-shine at the flame-lit perimeter.

This morning a cloud-fractured sky finally has its say. Darkness and Light are the conjoined twins of Illumination. Like its counterpart, Darkness is not a uniform condition. It shape-shifts, eases, or intensifies depending on the nighttime movement of clouds, trees silhouetted by moonlight, or the inky bulk of bear shadow clawing at the orchard fence in search of the last apples.

Light is most beautiful when it shines through brokenness. Shatter of sunshine through cracked ice. Sun spawning rainbows from storm clouds. Poetry pouring forth from grief. Even so, brokenness shouldn’t become an aspiration. Our imperfect lives in these finite bodies has a way of enforcing that without extra help from us. But what about hope? The hope that yearns for the return of Light in these darkest of days? Emily Dickinson wrote that “Hope” is the thing with feathers. Or maybe “Hope” is the reflection of Light from Raven feathers. Or a scatter of forest shadows. Or hurrying toward a well-lit cabin with Cougar inhabiting the dark spaces of your mind.

The abbreviated day slips away on rural chores that I have the luxury of doing only one or two days a week. Shoring up the firewood supply. Putting away things that were thrown in haphazard piles earlier in the fall when time was too short to deal with them. By late afternoon, nightfall begins to steal in on padded feet. She gathers herself like fog beneath the tree line along the meadow and in the lee spaces of buildings. Then she rushes into the open like a dark cat and overwhelms the weakened daylight.

I retreat into the wood-warmed house. There is canned chili for dinner. Some reading by the woodstove. Finally, I burrow into a cold sleeping bag and wait for my body heat to warm the flannel liner. Click off the lamp. Allow eyes and heart to adjust to the absence of Light. Darkness is so complete that even the bedroom window disappears without a trace. My eyelids shutter into yet another blackness. Then all the blacknesses are subsumed by sleep.

May Peace find all of you in these shadowed spaces of Winter.