When I feared the dark

Far far back, beyond recorded history, back into the earliest days of our species, back before we emerged as something recognizably “us”, our ancestors feared the dark. It isn’t hard to understand why. The night was when we were hunted. Masked by the shadows, creatures mighty of tooth and claw could tear us from the safety of our homes, dragging us away to be devoured. Fire helped us to push back the night, but that only enforced that it was to be dreaded. As time progressed and we moved into the “safety” of villages and towns and cities we escaped the wild’s predators and created our own. Once again it was the night that proved itself the source of danger as we became prey to ourselves. So much history, so many millennia, so much danger, and it would seem that the unforgiving machinery of evolution has hard coded fear of the dark into our DNA. Is that all there is and is to be of the story?

When I was young I feared the dark as many children do. What could not be seen, only imagined, slightly heard, barely guessed at, was a source of uncertainty and alarm. The causeless creak of old floorboards, branches that rustle beneath the influence of unseen forces, stillness that seems pregnant with the specter of hobgoblins and shades of other creatures from the nightmares of our primitive past. When you’re a child, seething with an overactive imagination, it doesn’t take much to convert small unknowns into massive fears. When we awake in the night, in the clutches of a bad dream, only to find ourselves surrounded by impenetrable blackness, we are taught to shine a light about us, dispersing the fears. Light is the anodyne to all the terrors that haunt us, revealing the real, mundane world, safe and secure. As I look back now, removed from my childhood by the passing of the years, I can analyze my fear, considering its sources and effects. Was my fear genuinely mine or was it imposed on me by a societal expectation that I should be afraid of the dark? Ultimately I don’t think it matters in the face of the truth: I was terrified of the dark.

I don’t remember how or when it happened, but eventually I stopped being afraid of the dark. I don’t think its terribly unusual for this to happen. It’s normal to grow out of that phase and abandon childhood fears. The night loses its mystery, becoming something that can simply and casually be done away with at the flick of a switch. The mysterious sounds become knowable and known, deduced and dismissed. The looming unfamiliar shrinks and pales, until it is far less critical than it once was. Even if we don’t lose our fear entirely we learn different techniques, as adults, for relegating it to the unimportant. We rationalize. We use logic. The dark is not dangerous, in and of itself, but it is to be viewed with caution. There are hazards to be avoided, whether small and benign or large and full of harmful intent. Or, perhaps, we lose some of that imagination that colored and defined our world as children. Imagination to be stirred by the dimming of the light. Imagination to be fired by old memories. For myself it was parts of most of these things though none of them all. There was something more, though, something extra.

I don’t remember how or when it happened, but I moved beyond no longer fearing the dark and came to love it. What before had been an impenetrable murk, burdened with danger, transformed into a silken veil drawn across a dark queen’s face. Senses long cast into sleep by sight’s dominance were awakened, stirred to power and vitality. I stopped seeking to banish the dark and instead stretched my arms wide to embrace it. Where once the sinking of the sun played sinister music in my mind, primitive rhythms—like the frenzied pulse of dancers, writhing in the night—came to dominate and cast leaping shadows of excitement within me. The fading of the light became a signal, not of danger, but of passion and energy coming alive in my soul. Just as distant thunder, approaching with clamorous rumble, sends most running for shelter and me running into the storm, the night drew me outward. Like a wolf’s howl I was invited—challenged—to breathe in and rejoice. More than anything else the night was still—or was once again—home to the memory of creatures from folklore, come crawling out of the dark forests primeval, but I came to make it my home as well. Somehow, somewhen, I claimed for myself a mantle of night, all at odds to reason and logic.

The sultry caress of a warm summer night, the air full of scents and sounds unknown to the day. The cold bite of autumn’s midnight hour, dry leaves scattering before the wind (or is it the hooves of the Goblin-king’s horses?). The gust front, whipping through forests of Oak and Ash and Thorn, as it races ahead of the storm. The susurration of waves on an unseen shore. The coyote’s bark, echoing out of a distant canyon. The hunting cry of an owl as it ghosts overhead. The stillness when all others have found their rest. The welcome loneliness of a splendid isolation. Thoughts undisturbed by the inescapable noise of the waking world. Conversations whose depth and breadth are impossible beneath the light of the sun. Being able to listen for and hear truth. Being able to look for and see a different reality. Dreams lived. Running with abandon. Declaiming to the moon and singing out to night’s goddess as her the pin-pricked obsidian of her tresses sweep across the heavens!

Why should I choose only to walk beneath the light of a single, over powering star? Why can I not instead prefer the glory of a million stars shining down from a velvet sky? Better the glare of day to be squinted at and shielded against, or the allure of night that calls upon me to open wide all the senses gifted to me by my fore bearers? Am I to be no more than prey, shivering in my burrow as the light fades away, or can I choose to be the hunter, master of myself and mastered by none, stalking beneath the mantle of midnight spaces? For me the confined comfort of holding back the night, or to gaze from rocky heights across the moon-silvered countryside? Must I choose to fear, or can I choose to love instead? Am I no more than the sum of my species’ fears, or is my whole greater than the parts that have come before me?

I don’t remember how or when I learned to love the dark instead of fearing it, nor does it matter. All that does is that I have transcended what once weighed me down and have instead made of it a source of strength and confidence and joy. Call me strange, if you will. Call me different. But maybe—maybe—learn from my example as well. Who knows what love lies within your fear.