Loving the Long Dark

Reflections on the Winter Solstice

There is a moment in the movie “The Dark Knight Rises” where Bane, the villain, defeats Batman, utterly. But before he does, Bane says something that has gripped me since the moment I first heard it:

"Oh, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark; I was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding. The shadows betray you, because they belong to me!"

There’s menace in that speech, but also an uncomfortable honesty. My teens were dark. Darker than most, I suspect. I’ve seen things I couldn’t make sense of then. I grew up fast, grew up at night. Mostly solo.

There was a time when I was 15. I had gone into New York City with friends to see a ska show. I think it was The English Beat, plus a slew of local bands, playing at a Ukrainian church. After the show, I drifted away from my friends and just walked around the streets of lower Manhattan. I walked, hands in pockets, past bums and hookers and drunks and crackheads and heroin addicts, all children of the night. I felt weirdly calm and unafraid, although my fingers fidgeted constantly with a folding knife in my pocket.

In the blue hour before dawn, I finally walked down the stairs beneath Madison Square Garden, towards the train that would take me home to Westfield. Early commuters bustled around me. I’d get home in time to grab my books for school. No one ever noticed I was missing.

I’ve since carved out a good life for myself. That darkness rests now. It’ll never die until I do, but I have taken its measure and, over time, I’ve molded it to suit me as I was molded all those years ago. I no longer look for someone to fill the void for me. I no longer fear it, nor its traveling companion, uncertainty.

Solstice is when I commune with it.

I have sat under a tree for all the long hours of the Summer Solstice, thinking about life and birds and women and what should I eat when the sun finally sets? It is a good exercise I highly recommend. But I have also sat through the Long Night, sipping tea made from herbs I’d gathered, or Scotch; usually a bit of both. Sometimes together.

There I think about stillness. I play dice with uncertainty, smiling quietly when they don’t go my way. That’s the game. The dice will turn, soon enough. Or not. I think about the connections in my life and how they remain strong — fierce, even — without constant validation. This is, after all, the quietest of seasons.

The darkness has taught me that I am not here to fix things. I am not here to save anyone, even myself. Advice I will give, but only if asked. Not because I love less, but because I’ve learned that love is often ill-served by problem solving. This has taken me a very long time to accept. As a journalist, especially as an investigative journalist, my life’s purpose was to find problems and air solutions, with the hope that I might, in some small way, effect positive change. Do that long enough and it seeps into your soul.

But the ethos of a repairman can blind you to what matters more: listening. Hearing those around you, holding space for those who have precious little of their own. I would far rather be a place of rest for those I love than the architect of their salvation.

None of this is to say I don’t strive, or yearn to improve those aspects of myself that need improvement, a list of which would require some time to enumerate. I am not rejecting preparation. I am rejecting impatience.

These past weeks, I have slowed to greet the night on its own terms. I’ve said “no” a lot, and because I now live in Minnesota, I’ve done it nicely. I’ve slept longer, and even still I wake before the sun. I’ve returned to the gym, and have felt my body grow stronger again. I have stopped trying to tie a neat bow on each day. Life isn’t like that, after all.

And I’ve finally restored my beloved nighttime routine of books, tea, a nip of mezcal or Scotch, occasionally a quiet goodnight conversation with a dear friend.

Like last year, I am hard at work on a book, although in this case it’s a revision of my cookbook Buck, Buck, Moose, which turns ten years old this coming year. The work is comforting. I know this topic inside and out, and have learned much over the past decade. I am already happy with its improvements, and I suspect you may be, too.

Every Solstice, I leave my house an hour or three before sundown, dressed for whatever the weather demands. And I walk, in no particular direction, until it is truly dark. And then I walk some more. The cold touches my skin with the caress of the White Queen, although she will not visit today. I watch my breath, visible in the chill, rise to heaven at stoplights. And by walk’s end, I am sweating. My body begins to steam like my breath. Time to go home, put water on for tea, get cozy on this longest of nights.

I may decide in the New Year to visit Germany, or Britain, or maybe return to Mexico. Or none of these. I’m going to let things flow in the way that they often do. And if I am unsure, the answers tend to come after I turn out the lights. In the dark, I remember what endures. Even a shade leaves warmth.