December's light makes you work
Heckscher State Park in Huntington. Winter landscapes are black and white; you have to focus to ferret out the color. Credit: Rick Kopstein
December is a peculiar month, the most ethereal page on the calendar.
It is a study in contrasts. Light and dark. Festivity and quiet. Communal gatherings and moments alone. Joy and sorrow. The end of one year and the prelude to another.
We are deep into it now. Its mysteries and magic are doing their work, confounding and comforting us in what sometimes seems to be nearly equal measure.
The duality has nearly reached its peak, with the shortest day of the year arriving Sunday. The winter solstice brings with it the longest stretch of darkness and the least amount of daylight. But what daylight it is.
It's light that makes you work. Winter landscapes are black and white, you have to focus to ferret out the color. But when a blue jay lands on your backyard bird bath, the burst of color is breathtaking. Summer lays out the palette. Winter makes you conjure it.
There are scientific explanations for winter's light. With the sun at its lowest angle in the sky, its light slanting in like driving rain in a gale, it must travel a longer distance to reach us. That gives Earth's atmosphere more time to filter out the brighter blues and greens, leaving a more delicate mix of reds, oranges and yellows — what we have come to know as the golden light of winter. It casts the year's longest shadows, an apt metaphor for a month hued by its furtive secrets.
The novelist Willa Cather wrote that "The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify — it was like the light of truth itself."
This is light that is best at the edges of darkness, our sunrises and sunsets, but it is light that also bathes a midday scene in a soft kind of peace.
Many cultures see in the golden light of winter a symbol of the divine, a representation of love and grace, a positive force of transformation, a conduit to a higher consciousness.
That's also appropriate for a month during which our ghosts are at their most present. I have written about mine before. I had thought earlier in my life that my ghosts would come less frequently as time passed but I'm finding the opposite to be true. My ghosts are all around at this time of year, popping in and out, summoned or not, with memories and morals of the past.
They come as I glance at a holiday decoration, as the old china comes off the shelf for a special dinner, as a special tune wafts across the air, as I teach a new generation of grandchildren how to operate the train that circles the tree. Where I once imagined I would shudder at the emergence of my ghosts, I now welcome them like a warm woolen sweater. When old words or laughter float by, I snatch them before they fade away.
In December, the light and the ghosts are fleeting, and you grab at both as best you can.
They're quite a tandem. At their best, they bring us solace and comfort and help create a cocoon that shelters us from the meanness and crassness in this world. The cocoon is illusory, of course, but it feels real and so we hang onto the light and clutch at our ghosts as long as we can because we need that cocoon, as fleeting as it also might be.
It's just one more part of that duality, yet another component of the tug-and-pull that makes up life. The crassness gets the ink, but the kindness will be what saves us.
At this special time of year, may your ghosts come early and stay late and may you always find the light.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a retired member of the Newsday editorial board.
