I went walking on the trail behind our house the other night, after dark with our dog. I have a light on a head band that everyone in our family likes to laugh at. It's OK though, even though I look pretty ridiculous at least I can see where I'm going.
I came to a wide spot in the trail and shut off the light, just standing there awhile letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I don't know that it even registered in the dog's mind that anything had changed. He was obsessively sniffing every square inch he could reach before I shut the light off. Nothing changed afterward. It was a clear moonless night and it was truly dark.
At first I was completely blind and only able to see a few stars through the trees. While I was waiting for my eyes to adjust, I started thinking. I thought about the raccoons that are everywhere this year. One of our nieces had to take her dog to the vet after a run in with a raccoon. I thought about the well dressed, semi-mysterious vagrant that I've seen around the valley of late. And I even thought of the really thrilling mountain lion tracks I've seen in the sand by the railroad tracks. Did I mention that mountain lions hunt at night?
Thankfully, about the time my thoughts turned round to the mountain lion, I started to be able to make out more detail. Still though, much of what I'd been able to see only a moment before remained obscured by the ubiquitous reality of the darkness. In the forest at night, darkness is reality. Any light we take there is limited. Our lights help us only with the steps immediately in front of us. Flashlights do not offer much help identifying land marks which are easy to see during the day.
I got stuck on the trail once without a flashlight. I know this will be a great surprise to everyone who knows me but I am fully capable of talking too much. That evening I ran into a couple people up there that I've become acquainted with over the years, as well as a stranger that started telling me about the cooking school he was attending. By the time my jaws were tired and my voice was hoarse, it was very nearly dark and I was nearly two miles from home.
The first part of the walk wasn't bad. The sun was freshly set and there was still a bit of twilight. Hiking toward home, the trail follows railroad tracks for quite a ways and then morphs into a paved road, a dirt road and finally into a trail that's occasionally maintained when myself and few others choose to do so. By the time I got to the dirt road night had fallen and the beginning of the dirt road strongly resembled the entrance of a rather dark cave. In the end I got home (slowly) by using my cell phone display as though it were a really bad flashlight.
Since then, and with the addition of a flashlight, I've been hiking in the dark regularly for a while now. As a result, I've become aware of how much we don't see. The little lights we take into the darkness light our immediate area, the path we're on and our home base. Everything else though remains in darkness, indifferent to our small candles.
Turns out though, there's a great deal of beauty and life in the darkness. Full moons cast amazing shadows and create shafts of moonlight through the trees. Turkeys can be heard settling in for the night. There's a juvenile coyote that yips from time to time, trying to convince someone of something. None of this really stands out though or isn't even visible when you're busy trying to figure out what each stick is that enters your cone of light and where exactly you're going to put your next step.
Its' easy to fall prey to dependence on having to see and in so doing, miss the beauty that's all around us...because at first it all looks really dark. Instead of standing intentionally quiet and still, we point a light at something, turn it on and let it define the world around us, hoping that the little light will chase away our fear. It might accomplish that for a moment. However, if you're like me you'll start to look out to the edge of what the light reveals and try to imagine what the next shape is going to be, even before you get close enough to resolve it.
We take the light with us with the idea we can control the dark and protect ourselves. Of course, all we wind up doing is shining a light cone fifty or so feet in front of us. In the end, that small light limits and even defines everything we see. The staggering truth is that we were made for greater vision and a greater reality.
Traveling in the dark is a little scary. It gets less so over time but it will always have a level of trepidation associated with it that is unique. Even so, our fear of stumbling in the dark can become an invitation to slow down, to listen carefully, to pick out each step of the trail we're on deliberately and to learn to enjoy the night. And when all that's said and done, we'll still need a breath of faith to believe we've planted our step correctly and that the trail is as it's always been.
Darkness can be chased away or held at bay with a Maglite, headlight or even a cell phone. It can only be redeemed though when we accept it for what it is, accept ourselves for who we were spoken to be and accept that each step in darkness will require a good bit of patience, deliberateness and listening. Most of all though, it requires that we have faith both for the journey and for each step.
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