Darkness, darkness, be my pillow

This was originally written a long time ago.  My nephew is in college now and my niece is headed there next year:

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head, and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your dream
            -Jesse Colin Young

A list of just a few things, better when dark, or black:

Fertile earth
Shadow
Star-viewing night sky
Ebony wood
Ink
Little black dress
Sable
Charcoal
Judicial robes
Black belt
Being in the black (financially solvent)
Being in the black (in fire suppression, being in a safe zone that is already burned)
Limousines

When I was a little brown-haired child, growing up among the blond crowds in Minnesota, I wanted to be blonde.  I fell asleep praying to an indifferent god to turn my hair yellow overnight, to cure a family friends kid who had polio and to keep my family safe.  In that order.  All around me, I saw messaging that to be blonde, to be lighter, was better.  Aesthetically, morally better.  The blondes in stories always fared well, angels in religious art were almost universally golden-haired.  The slogan "blondes have more fun" was omnipresent, and there was  an as yet inexplicable association of dark haired girls with evil, or plainness, and light-haired girls with desirability - in a way that somehow assured survival life's trials.

As an adult, I came to understand  that there are powerful cultural biases associated with darkness.  These biases appear in eastern and western, ancient and modern cultures.  Darkness is associated with evil, and to be dark is to be bad.  Troubling also is the fact that some subcultures fetishize darkness, co-opting cultural practices that have African origins, or underscoring the association of darkness with evil or danger, like some popular comic-book characters. Dark clothing or dark appearance often is a shorthand way to establish the "bad-boy" or "bad-girl" tropes - alluring but dangerous. 

I took this very personally as a kid, and always sought out positive associations with darkness.  A grade school classmate I think felt this also - his last name was Brown. Once our class was asked to write a poem about a color.  I wrote about brown, all positive things - wet tree bark, fragrant earth, chocolate cake, rugged bear and soft fawn.  I remember him ducking his head while I read, embarrassed perhaps to think he may have been singled out by the weird girl in class.  Or maybe he hadn't thought about his name that way before and was pleased.  But honestly, I wasn't thinking about him - the poem was about my own brown hair.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about brown skin, like my Colombian-born nephew and niece. I don't really know what it is like for my nephew to be concerned about proper behavior if he is stopped by police - but I hate it that for him a traffic stop may mean either life or death, and merely driving poses a risk.

It's true that there is something primal about the fear of the dark for animals like us who can be prey. That is an honest, no-fault fear that I understand. It must also be the place where the dark-light bias originates.  Humans all over the world beat back the night with artificial light. But in truth, much of that lighting amounts to displays of ego and wealth meant to impress, not protect. It seems to me that humans have overcome the visceral fear of the dark, and it is only situationally legitimate.

The lyrics above, and these writers' works defy the dark-is-bad trope:

But when I lean over the chasm of myself - 

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches 

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Rilke - The Book of a Monastic Life

 

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

In the dark I rest,

unready for the light which dawns

day after day, eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me.

I need 

more of the night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination.  I must still 

grow in the dark like a root

not ready, not ready at all

Denise Levertov - 

What would it take to smash this bias? The "Black Lives Matter" and "Dark Skies" movements have momentum and support, but the depth of the bias is evident in the strong pushback each receives.  Symbols like the flag of the Confederacy, and statutes erected to honor slavers are coming down. Chipping away at these symbols shows that maybe humans can shift the paradigm.

 

 

Check, check, check

Am I hearing all of this right? Check, check, check.

Can I cross "writing" off my new task sheet, listing the activities, therapies, meditation, exercise and medications? Check, check, check.

Am I writing again like I did earlier in this blog, nonsensical, stream of consciousness, bare and revealed? Check, check, check.

Am I spending our retirement money, front-end loading the out flow of funds, trusting that I'll be healthy enough, peaceful enough to endure what ever indignities the passing years confer on me. Check, check, give me the check.

Am I hearing all of this right? Are my hearing aids working to improve my attentiveness, eliminate the undercurrent of frustration that plagued me unawares for years, pulling into my soundscape at last those elusive bird songs heard by the rest of the crew, by my dead friend Curt who urged me to look into hearing aids, who put his in one of my ears at the Black Forest Inn, bringing tears to my ears, but I didn't take the step until weeks after his premature death. Thank you Curt, and check, check, check. 

My checklist says that for this week, I should write for 30 minutes a day. I have a sliver of time before going out to dinner with friends, so I am fitting in this work. I don't want to stop. I think that is a good sign.  I think the clatter is going to drive Carolyn nuts. I will replace this laptop and hope for a quieter keyboard, because I think this is going to be a happy, regular thing.  Check, check, check.

Not Ready

(December 2014) It is likely to hit 50 degrees here in the not-so-frozen North next

week.  That is good for the installation of the french doors in our dining room, and my cousin’s repair of our outdoor grounded outlet, and replacement of floodlights. That is bad for my bees.

Normally at this point, they would be nicely encased in a robe of snow. That prevents the considerable heat inside from dissipating to the outside.  Their need for food is less when they are crammed into a ball, not moving much.  When it warms up inside the hive, they get more active and move around more, eating.  It means there will be less food in the cold weather when they really need it.  Winters like this, they starve.

I took no honey off them this year, wanting them to live through the winter, so I have done all I can.  When I open them up next week, I may find them to be aggressive and to have “broken cluster.”  They are good bees, and I’d like to have them make it.

I’m not ready to lose my first backyard hive to winter.  I already lost one this Spring, possibly because they swarmed, possibly because they drifted.  Possibly because they were poisoned.  This summer I saw unmistakable signs of pesticide poisoning in bees returning to the hive - or rather trying to.  They convulse on hard cool surfaces before dying.  Surfaces like concrete, and pavers.

Also, not ready to lose my new-found cousin.  Spouse to my third cousin, he was a fisherman from Unalaska, and continues to be  a vital presence in the lives of all who love him.  He is one of those forces who clearly only inhabits a physical form, and is not altered by what ever condition that physical form may be subjected to.  

I never finished this post.  All sorts of things sloughed off my plate while we waited for Vern to live his last moments.  Bills, yarn, work, artifacts - many things went missing in the weeks before he died.  I am still recovering them from hidden places.  His widow has moved on and away, living the life she put on hold for so long, under the sea.  I come away with a freezer full of venison, a remote connection to a kindred spirit with whom I share blood and spirit though not a life.  Some one who propels my thoughts about inheritance in eugenic directions that makes me uncomfortable, or perhaps simply more comfortable with supernatural explanations of a few threads of  commonality.

But mostly I am left with a self-absorbed fascination with her - is this what my life would have been without the moderating influence of my life?