Fall

The season of the long nights has returned, when the days seem to run out of steam before we do. The sun is up for only 10+ hours now. That is five hours less than the high at the summer solstice. We are losing light at an average of 2 minutes a day.

As if that isn't enough, the sun once again sets one stolen-hour earlier. The hands of our clocks had stealthily snatched the light from the morning and tacked it onto the evening. The perfect pinch, though we get caught every year. It was time to give it back.

Still, the time-change hardly changes anything. We moderns, addicted to the drug of artificial light, set our days by GMT.

And yet, the older I get, the more I feel the flow of nature's time. I am becoming like the birds: drape the cloth of darkness over my cage and I am ready to quiet down, settle in, cozy up on the couch with a cup of tea and call it a day.

Night is not just a dark version of daylight, and it cannot fully be chased away with glowing globes. Folks with Seasonal Affective Disorder have to fight to maintain their summer-level perkiness in this abundance of darkness. Throughout human history, time has been a character, an agent, a place, an opportunity, a call, a fear.

It is the messenger of love and a multiplier of loneliness, a midwife to birth and death, to feasting and celebration, to sorrow and loss. It had its own demons - Lilith being one, that seducer of men and snatcher of babies.

In the Bible, the Tanakh, it is where dreams appear and lovers tryst: where Jacob met the angel and Ruth met Boaz.

I spent this season's first long night preparing the nest, cooking, laying in stocks for the winter: applesauce from a bushel of apples, an armful of calzone for a month of Shabbat meals, a batchful of cookies (hint: don't get creative and tamper with a generation's-old family recipe).

I washed the floor and did our laundry listening to earth-songs on Pandora.

And now it is morning - with fall's sun blazing fully in the big sky, no longer fighting with the summer foliage.

Yesterday, sitting in silence at the Gunpowder Friends Meeting and seeing the wind blow up and shuffle all the leaves, one member of the service was moved to say: I am thankful for eyes that can see this shower of gold outside our window.

Small moments of grand pleasure. We need them more than ever.


(Photo image: Flagstaff Dark Sky - what our ancestors saw)