10/25/10 Going to work in the dark

Such a wonderful time of year, autumn... For some odd reason, we humans keep time mostly by mathematical divisions of more or less equal parts, the numerical hours changing their relationship to the actual day with a niggling numerical whine, over the course of the year. Get up now!!!, the round face complains, says that it's time to eat breakfast, shower and go to work, even though your body knows, as the earth and all of nature knows, that dark is the time to sleep. Go to lunch now!!! the mechanisms of the office shout, you must be hungry, and the little digital timekeeper must be fed. Go home now!!! You wish you had been cuddling safe at home with your loved ones hours ago, but it's here you must remain until the timekeepers dismiss you. But we humans know more, know deeper, and the factual evidence of darkness strikes notes that disturb the superstructure. So, in winter, here in the Upper Midwest, we go to work and come home in the dark.

Okay, that sounds burdensome, so here's the ecstasy part: Who would have thought that a rational, sentient, emotional species would have found a way and a nearly universal compulsion to get up in the dark during the coldest time of year? What a feat! We all want to sleep, but no! We all have this ability to rouse ourselves, expose our senses to artifically-generated indoor light, and dispatch the necessary tasks to pretend that it's still midsummer. What a hoot!

Oops, I really meant for this post to be about how calm and lovely and striking it is in the dark, a time we rarely inhabit during the warm months (speaking strictly for myself). How you gradually say goodbye to the light during weeks of morning bus rides, how things seem quiet, protected, compared to in the lurid bustling daylight. Sometimes an ecstasy is scattershot.