As a matter of course, I turn on the extractor fan in our bathroom that you enter off the hall.
White noise fills the air.
I make the barefoot pad round to my bed and then I slowly realize: There’s no need for it tonight. My children and my husband are away.
There’s no need for the whirling, humming sound to block the air, to absorb the sounds of life that sit behind it.
Our house, a brick bungalow from the 1960’s, is talkative and chatty. Her floorboards creak and giggle, her door’s hinges quirky, like to fuss.
The eyelids of my boys, so it turns out, open and close in rhythm with her tunes, the peeking out of eyes the precursor in a chain, the next link being sounds of feet hitting the floor.
If night is a time for sleeping my boys are yet to get the memo. The fan becomes our friend, a portal of possibility that allows for a fluttering of life into the night as she absorbs all of the sharp edges, the ones that lead to bedtime interruptions.
But tonight, I hit the off switch, crawl gratefully into bed. The house feels very silent. I feel no doubt safely held. And yet here, lying in the dark, my ears are punctuated with noises going off like tiny fireworks, the kind of sounds that lead to curly thoughts.
What is that? I wonder to myself, in response to a sharp creaking.
I pull the covers up little more.
I hear an owl outside, a certain beauty that magnifies aloneness. The edges of my skin and that outside wild place separated by a small pocket of air and ten centimeters of brick.
My body knows the swathes of forest and shores of ocean that sit beyond these walls. The openness feels vast and at night possibly foreign.
I crave solitude and yet when it’s in the darkness that she meets me, she’s a space I find confronting. My mind seeks her out, wants to lessen the restrictions of the days, a respite from all the people and all their questions.
But in the dark, and when outside, instead of peace, I find alertness.
A more switched on-ness as opposed to switching off.
I read some quotes on solitude, something useful to insert here but I don’t find words that speak the truth of what I’m seeking, despite knowing that they’re out there.
There is the solitude of sitting alone in a café or a library.
The solitude of a house that’s busy one end while you sit at another.
But this wild solitude, the one without the light of which I speak, and of which I often yearn, is something different yet again.
It’s not a quiet moment, an open book, a cup of coffee.
It’s snapping twigs, and what’s that’s, and shapes within the blackness to the eyes that seem possibly threatening and certainly unfamiliar.
It’s rampant imagination and the stringent taste of drip-fed fear.
For a woman, one that’s alone and out in nature, it’s the vivid hope that what is sensed is not a man. Our bodies vibrate with the real and conditioned fear of unwanted visitations, the concern putting a handbrake on adventures into otherwise craved spaces of the wild and unfamiliar.
The unfairness of this, I think to myself, does not make it any less of a real-felt truth.
Tonight, I know I’m not in the outdoors. I’m in my bed in the throes of supposed to be sleeping. But this mindscape is one with which I’m intimately familiar. She’s one that joins me often. One that I’ve known from all my years of growing up.
Of the lamp left on at night. Of concerns of being outside in the moments after dark.
Of camping in the bush, a fervent countdown to the light.
Of the logical part of your brain attempting to out-talk the effusive and outspoken stream of internal, narrated insanity.
Of the waiting for your people to be home, so the house that you’re in once more contains another body.
I read words about the dark, the confusion of our addiction, our conditioning to the light distorting the instincts of my nighttime animal friends.
Migrations that are disturbed by the constant shine that beams from urban centres.
The scrambled navigation of soft winged moths confused by outside lights left permanently on.
The death trap that is a shining space beyond the pane of reflective glass.
I think of the sensor light outside my office. I’d never considered how something so seemingly innocuous might confuse the minds of the insects and the plants. I resolve to turn it off.
I get up and turn it off.
The next night, I step out into the dark. My phone is in my pocket, but not switched on.
I’m venturing into the dark by choice and with no productive purpose. My mission is to let all the versions of my mind enter the wild, and to let them have their way.
I pick my way over driveway stones and up the path that winds through the Manuka. This one leads up to the stables and down to the paddocks at the back.
As I walk, the darkness around me gradually begins to thicken.
My eyes see less and less. My body feels into the spaces that in the light she doesn’t take the time to notice.
We feel security in the sunlight. Is the same possible in the dark?
John O’Donahue writes:
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Night-time is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.
This rest he speaks of, I muse, is not the normal kind.
It’s the rest of expectations, of being witnessed as a singular, aesthetic form.
It’s a stripping back to our essential nature, an exposing of our baseline, animal selves.
In the dark, without the help of light or weapons of protection, we no longer feel, no longer are, entitled or above it.
We are reduced, aware, alert, exposed as any other roaming free, looking for a safe space on which to land.
At what point, I wonder to myself, did we assume we were entitled to our comforts?
That to seek a sense of ease was the whole point?
The thought, that my companion of anxiety and my switched-on alertness to my surroundings was something to be expected creates a paradox of comfort.
The creatures that roam around me distinguish between the sounds that are the norm and those that represent the unfamiliar. They are more accustomed to the night and her cloak of dark- that I know for sure- accepting the concern without adding the layering of overthinking or narration.
Night-time is womb-time.
I consider this some more.
My womb has carried the life of two babies to full term, felt the absence and the loss of two others more. But pregnancy for me was not a place of nourishment and of rest.
It was a place of physical upheaval, a body flung to sea at high tide doing it’s best not to revolt, to maintain its breath, to swim, and not to sink.
A stretching and a reconfiguration. A ever present nausea, a countdown to birth and hoped for quelling of die-ease. A growing from within and also out.
The night time, the womb time is not a place of silence or of rest. It is a place of busy, of life creasing and unfolding.
Of whole worlds taking shape without distraction of the light.
Us humans, in the dark, we don’t get to control here. We know so many things are happening beyond our noticing.
We can’t constrain the worlds we cannot see.
Perhaps it is the darkness, not the light that will assist with modern disorientation. Our dissociation from the land, how we comfort our way into the throes of unwellness and ill health.
Perhaps we require the retreat; the turning off of eyes, the turning on of skin, the reminder we don’t tread the earth alone.
A state of being only darkness can provide.
The darkness, it seems, breathes you in and spits you out. You land, grateful and disheveled, in a different place from where it was that you began, more noticing and tuned in to the light.
And here it is, the peace.
It’s found in the transitions, the hollows left for dawning and for dusk.
The not quite light and not quite dark pause between the breaths.
