Baring All

(An easy Sunday ramble read.)

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It wasn’t unusual for me to ponder the plausibility, truthfulness and very existence of my spirit animal on my morning run. My mind could wander. Far.

I was a wolf. I’d worked out that much by going to a GCSE art exhibition at the age of 17.

How, you wonder.

We saw a piece of art about the animal inside. It was Obama, compared to a Canadian bear. Beside it was a mirror. It said:

What’s your spiritual animal?

I looked, baring my teeth a little.

Wolf, I thought. “Wolf,” I said.

“Wolf,” my mum agreed.

And so it was that I began to adopt the persona of the wolf. Not that I wasn’t already the wolf in my looks;

• The long pointed nose
• Glowing eyes
• Sharp incisors

Nor in my personality;

• Passionate
• Self-motivated
• Ambitious
• Mildly aggressive/ stubborn

It was more that I owned the person that I was. I came to enjoy the wolf. I enjoyed being the beast.

*

Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m talking about this. Me too. But basically I listened to a podcast this morning from the Guardian about why we fear the dark and how we are hardly ever in darkness.

It went that as children we are told that bad things lurk in the dark. That darkness is to be feared. In a religious sense, the light (whether it be a singular God or multiple or wisdom or truth or enlightenment) came to save us from darkness.

Why did we need saving from the night? Why do we use this metaphorical binary to glorify good?

The night sky always always ALWAYS holds a fascination and a draw towards it. The blackness and the realisation of our insignificance. The knowledge that a life beyond our control exists above our heads.

I remember being in India. It was the most breath-taking sky I had ever seen. Laying on the sandy school playground in the Himalayan foothills and staring at the sky. The fact that you could see satellites was magnificent. It enveloped me. I couldn’t sleep unless I’d had my dosage of the night sky.

There is so much wonder in the night that it does startle me a little that our culture has demonized the night. We are cruel because in the night we know are murderers and rapists and ghosts and shifts between universes. Except they are not. As many crimes happen in the day than in the night. In fact more.

So, why do we fear the night? Why is darkness the bad guy?

It’s strange because I feel more guilt when I miss the morning because they say it’s the best part of the day.

I find days functional; yes. Pretty; yes. But not always overwhelming.

I mean that in the sense of what I see. I prefer how the light looks when it makes shadows slide down mountain faces in the evening. Or when trees take a stretch over the fields at dusk. When the setting sun is like a painter at his easel streaking canvas with oranges and pinks and purples.

That is when the world comes alive; when the human world deems it sleeping.

I’d like to go back to being the wolf in the classic essence of the animal. Think wolf and you think night. Think wolf and you think moon.

It’s impossible to draw the two apart. That is what the wolf is. That is the land where it reigns. Perhaps that’s why we fear the night;

It is not our territory.

We think the night is useless. We decide it can only be for sleep. Lights out, doors closed, curtains drawn. That’s what happens in the night.

If we club until 4am we are crazy. No one stays up that late. How could you be so strange to take advantage of the dark?

What, I suppose we could ask ourselves, is; what can we do with the dark?

Our society is not apt for the dark. The only things that we can do is that which does not depend on other human services. A purpose that depends only on our own solitude. Our own ability to create fun. Our ability to create an aim for ourselves.

Our society makes no function for the darkness. But perhaps the world doesn’t depend upon our society’s value on ‘productivity’. And it doesn’t. The world existed before our societal regulations.

But perhaps we are right. The night has no purpose. Yet, it is not pointless. It is the chance for nothingness. The mandatory break essential to our humanity. Perhaps we don’t have to do anything with our night but that which it does to us. Let us be in the night and we have completed our purpose.

The night demands nothing of us and that, besides the wonder found in a glance at the stars, mysteries in the Milky Way, is the beauty of the darkness.