Edinburgh, Tuesday, 3pm. Darkness. Total darkness. This is not the dusk that follows sunlight. It is the dark that follows a day without sun. A day that has been grey from the moment I pulled back my curtain.
Life feels cold and arduous. The joy of everyday moments is battered by 90 MPH winds. Nights out have become a form of winter Olympics as we run from bar to club, to Bobbies and back, giving off vibes of arctic survival in the style of Netflix’ most recent movie ‘survival of the snow’.
Seeking solace, I have delved again into “Wintering” by Katherine May. May writes of the importance of the seasons for our bodies, and the impossibility of lives lived as one endless period of summer. She defines ‘Wintering’ as ‘a season of cold. It is a fallow period of life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined’. And despite wintering being involuntary and deeply painful, May describes how it is also inevitable. We cannot choose if we winter, we can however choose how we winter. We could be like the plants and animals who don’t fight the cold or pretend winter is not happening. Instead they prepare and adapt.
May’s book was recommended to me as a comforting meditation on how we can care for and repair ourselves. I like this book but still it does not fill the gaping hole of darkness, my yearning for evening light, Aperol Spritz and balmy feels.
Still seeking remedies, I turned next to Johan Elkof’s ‘The Darkness Manifesto’. Elkof is a Swedish bat expert and he explains why the world needs the night. Periods of dark calibrate our inner rhythms, controlling out bodily processes and our hormones. Each of these processes has been thrown into a state of flux by artificial light and our attempts to extend the day. Elkof pushes us instead to appreciate the night as we do the ocean, a place of little-known beauty with secrets we have yet to say.
I like this idea, but I would be lying if I said I’m finding the Edinburgh winter easy or that I’m not dreaming of warm holidays. I am however consoled to understand why the dark matters to our planet and humanity and I so I resolve to embrace the cosy mood and environment that winter and the early evenings bring.
“Edinburgh Castle by night” by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.