“Darkness…let your peace flow through me”

This time of year, I love sitting in our living room in the evening, watching how darkness and light play together, the twinkling of the tree twirling about with the shadows on the wall.

It feels safe and warm but with mystery and excitement still tantalizingly
in reach.

It’s the time of year when something ancient in us explores that interplay between darkness and light. The winter solstice sings songs to the longest night of the year while celebrating the coming return of longer days.

Collectively, western culture has portrayed this season not so much as a dance of dark and light, but as a reconsecration of the goodness of light which, in its everlasting glory, casts out dark.

The dark is depicted as the thing to be feared, the thing to be conquered, the thing to be rid of, while the less glorious aspects of lightness go unmentioned.

It was hard for me to even think of the less glorious aspects of lightness
at first.

The dull buzz of florescent bulbs has a numbing effect, and too much light wipes out the contours, dimension, and texture in a photograph leaving the figures vague and unremarkable. Our eyes throb painfully after staring at the white glow of the work screen for too long. And if something “pales in comparison” it’s a thin, less lively, less convincing, less enjoyable version. The white, sterile surroundings in a hospital make us feel more like numbers than people. Turning white means being drained of life. Storm troopers…

We are most practiced at assigning negative feelings and experiences to the dark, even though, in the course of our own living, light and dark each have their own spectrum of feeling.

While studying the color wheel in school, we learn that the term “high value” means lighter shades of color while the term “low value” means darker shades of color.

Someone who taught the color wheel this way for years is Olivia Gude, a high school art teacher in Chicago. She wrote an article called, “Color Lines”[1] exploring the implications of learning our colors the way we do.

Early in her career, Ms. Gude created all kinds of lesson plans related to the symbolism of dark and light. She wanted to teach her students the shared symbolic language they would need to know in order to interpret the great works of western art: whiteness and light produce a sense of ease. Blackness and dark are unsettling.

After these lessons, when her students were asked to create a sense of foreboding, or fear, or despair in their work, they drew dark storm clouds, trees heavy with shadow.

If they were instructed to depict innocence or hope or beauty they worked in lighter shades, creating streams of whiteness descending from the sky, a golden glow around human figures. 

This symbolic depiction of dark and light, after much repetition, creates deep grooves in our imagination.

Ms. Gude began to recognize that her students were, of course, relying on their individual experiences when they created art, but they were also drawing on the symbolic language she’d taught them, the color palette of the western cultural imagination.  

Ms. Gude reflected that “there is a strong tendency for teachers to continue speaking in a language of scientific certainty when discussing the symbolic meaning of colors” which results in “particular color preferences and associations [being] validated in the students’ minds as not merely habitual and customary, but as natural and instinctive.”

But colors are not inherently, naturally, tied to meaning. Here in the west, we tend to think of white as associated with weddings, beginnings, purity whereas in parts of China and India white is the color of mourning, of death.

In the white western imagination, dark and light have been typecast in limited roles, influencing the stories we tell ourselves about the world and each other.

How color plays out in our actual lived experiences is more complex.

Gude quotes the writer and activist, bell hooks, from her essay, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.”[2] In this essay, hooks writes about her experience of crossing from “the segregated blackness of [her own] community into a white neighborhood” to visit her grandparents’ house.

She writes, “I remember the fear, being scared to walk to Baba’s, our grandmother’s house, because we would have to pass the terrifying whiteness—those white faces on the porches staring us down with hate.”

She continues, “Oh! That feeling of safety, of arrival, of homecoming when we finally reached the edge of [their] yard, when we could see the soot black face of our grandfather, Daddy Gus, sitting in his chair on the porch, smell his cigar, and rest on his lap. Such a contrast, that feeling of arrival, of homecoming—this sweetness after the bitterness of that journey.”

Breaking through the type casting of darkness and light means seeing what’s unsettling and cruel in lighter shades and looking for beauty and goodness in places we’ve been told not to look. Setting dark and light free to play nuanced and varied roles.

In the words of Shelley Denham:

“Dark of winter, soft and still, ease my mind profoundly.
Darkness, soothe my weary eyes, that I may see more clearly.
When my heart with sorrow cries, comfort and caress me.
Darkness when my fears arise, let your peace flow through me.”[3]

[1] “Color Lines” by Olivia Gude in Learning for Justice, Issue 19, Spring 2001

[2]From the collection Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics by bell hooks 1990 Boston, MA: South End Press. Chicago

[3] “Dark of Winter” by Shelley Denham in Singing The Living Tradition #55