via Wimp

It’s also dark, but since it is late November most of the shops have already hung their lights and so it’s a bit like having a seat at a light show. The coffee shop on the corner is particularly good. It has a big tree and ribbons of small white lights hanging in all the windows. When I went in a few minutes ago to get my hot chocolate, they have decorated the tables with small red tartan flannel tablecloths. It looks surprising nice – surprising because I don’t much like Christmas and most of the decorations that come with this time of the year are either horribly sentimental or give me the heeby-jeebies.

Despite not liking the holiday, I do like the attention to light in this uncomfortably dark time of year. Of course winter light festivals are a really old practice in human history, since light to a diurnal species is bound to become a symbol when that species becomes able to have symbols.

I’m not really going anywhere with this except to say that I am still thinking about the moth and its instincts – instincts that become problematic in an artificially lighted environment. I wonder what killing the dark does to those moths and humans who live their lives in cities where the real-dark rarely penetrates? Having taught in a variety of wilderness camps, one thing I do know is that people unused to the dark have trouble adjusting to the difference between day and night and that this seems to make them deeply afraid of the world around them — and that fear can cause them to do pretty silly things. I wonder how different that is from what the moth does?

I respect the dark and, depending on where I am, I actually relish it. Still, the lights call out to me and come the shortest day, burning a candle all night reminds me that as much as I may think of my self as something special given that I belong to one of the species (I presume that somewhere in the universe there is another) that can symbolize, what I symbolize makes me remember that I am still very much the human animal evolved in the caverns of deep history.