The End of Night On this pre-dawn November morning, not even the moon shines through the cloud-dense sky. Yet it’s not quite dark. Patches of the trail are lit by streetlamps, and even where it’s not, the ambient light makes puddles shimmer, and the path is, if not clear, at least visible. In the city, we never experience true dark. At least not when we’re outside. Some twenty-five years ago, in Port Townsend, I stared in wonder at a brilliant sky lit up with a carpet of stars, for I hadn’t seen such a thing since childhood. In Portland, where I lived, the skies had long been dimmed by the…
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Winter Solstice and the Return of the Light
The Longest Night of the Year As I write this, around 5 pm on the Winter Solstice, the sky has been dark for about half an hour. Here in the Pacific Northwest, clouds obscure the stars and the moon.If I lived in the country, I would see blackness cover the land. Even in the most isolated areas, though, houses are blessed with the electricity that keeps my own home bright and my computer humming. No matter how early the sun sets, if I want to, I can work well into the night. I need not gather around a fire, drinking mulled cider, and listening to stories, though I might be…
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The Winter Solstice, Light, and Hope
The Winter Solstice Fills Me with Hope The Winter Solstice came and went this year with little notice from me. After working a long day and attending a meeting, I was focused on little except getting ready for bed, so it wasn’t until the next day during my predawn walk that I realized winter had arrived. The grass was tinged white with frost, the roads sparkled in the light from the street lamps, and the frozen trail crunched beneath my feet. Now and then, my dog lifted his nose, smelling coyotes or raccoons I couldn’t see. The squirrels and birds were asleep. Silence hung in the air. Then I climbed…
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The Light of Enlightenment
An Experience of Enlightenment Years ago, as I was listening to my spiritual director talk about the universe, I suddenly saw the universe inside her heart. Like Wordsworth, who saw the world in a grain of sand, I saw the universe as the size of a fist. In that moment, I understood that time and space don’t really exist, that the universe is immensely vast, but incredibly small at the same time. If we could comprehend this and learn to work with the energies that existed, we could cross to where star number 090423 exploded. In 2009, the light from this star reached the space-based Swift satellite. Using redshift analysis,…
