For the duration of "Long Snows Moon", dark is the name of the game. Even the totem mineral of the Chippewa for this period, obsidian -- the gleaming volcanic glass coughed up from the bowels of the earth -- is black as the closet of your worst childhood fears. Nights seem centuries long, daylight visits only fleetingly under Long Snows Moon. 

There's a part of me that anticipates and welcomes the dark with gladness. The wheeling of the planets can only be fully enjoyed when it's really dark, and it's a joyful thing to walk outside on a really dark night, the path illuminated only by stars, and to notice how one's eyes eventually adapt to give us the more acute organs of vision so depended upon by our distant ancestors before the days of artificial light. Yet,  another part of my genetic code, inherited from some superstitious peasant forebear, is made uneasy by the dark,  and wants to bang on pots and pans to make sure the light comes back on schedule as it always has, as from the brink of doom. 

Balance is the thing. A balance of light and dark, just enough of one and not too much of the other. There are as many ways that light is an irritant as it is a godsend, in my opinion. For instance, now that the leaves have departed the tree branches to lie about limply in our yard and gutters, the light pollution in the area becomes much more noticeable. There's a farm light in the valley below that is a particular nuisance. Unnecessarily so. It's not as if competing with the Milky Way does anything for that farmer's security. When I get rich off my new book, I intend to purchase a bunch of outdoor lighting shades, the kind designed to send the light downward where you need it, not upward where you don't, and present one as a gift to that fellow. I'll even climb the ladder to install it. He's not the only one on my list. 

Darkness conjures up snug comfort to a burrowing owl, a beaver, or other denning creatures. (I consider myself one of this retiring company.) What we want is just a period of repair, a sound sleep from which we may awaken refreshed, into lengthy, sun filled days. Our living room becomes a sort of Hobbit hole during Long Snows Moon, filled with silence that isn't really silent, with layers of pitchy blackness just beyond the circle of light. Woodfire crackles, fans give off a soft, continuous "shush", pages of books make a  scraping sound as they are turned in blanketed laps, a faucet drips.  Outside the wind clacks bare branches together like castanets to accompany muted music from the radio. When the ringing of the phone intrudes, it is jarring, and I sometimes can hardly pull up out of a book-induced trance to rejoin the flesh and blood world of kinfolk and friends. Brrring! brrring! "Hello? What was I up to? Well, I'm sailing the South Seas with Robert Louis Stevenson for the next few hours. What? No, I've not gone batty." 

There is darkness and then there is utter darkness, as in The Long Sleep. I'm told the last words of short story writer, O'Henry, were "Turn up the lights -- I don't want to go home in the dark." When he wound down like an old clock and shuffled right up to the face of death, O'Henry had trepidations about moving into the shadowy "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns." However, the fact that he referred to going home sounds as if he cherished hopes of a tranquil afterlife. Home. I detect in his words a foretaste of reunion with a familiar and cherished place, or perhaps being gathered to a loving bosom, so it would appear he just wanted enough light to be able to appreciate the scenery along the way.  

O'Henry's reference to home reminded me of what Gary Snyder, a favorite poet and neighbor to my mountain motherland in Northern California, wrote long ago, "The most radical thing you can do is stay home." In some sense our society has turned radical in this way, retreating behind closed doors with television for company, stuffing in facts and living vicariously through the lives of television. heroes and villains. Weather permitting, when my spouse and I walk by starlight and see flickering TV. images  in virtually every house we pass, I wonder idly  if what our neighbors are watching is more sublime that what the heavens show us that particular evening. There! -- a shooting star! Oh look, those planets have wandered so close together this month that Venus and Jupiter will soon be dancing in the dark. Oops, careful -- those white and black moving blobs over there are a mother skunk and her kits! Home again, having blown the stale, indoor air from our lungs, we are ready to curl up by the fire  and keep the darkness at bay...until it is time to retire into the dark to die a little death and be reborn.