Light Incoming

The earth turns, and no darkness is permanent.

Photo by Steven Su on Unsplash

Dear readers,

Saturday was the winter solstice, the day that marks the turn from ever-darker days to ever-lighter ones. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I’m writing to you from Hong Kong, where the days are cooler but where it doesn’t exactly feel like winter or Christmas — there’s no hope for snow, no need for a parka. Still, our building lobby is decked out with a tree, lights, and poinsettias. In my own apartment, stockings are hung. There’s no room in here for an official Christmas tree, so my husband and I decorated our fig, trimming it with Ikea lights and paper ornaments and $1 tinsel and a half-dozen tiny fake-brass bells on red ribbons. Every evening I turn the living room lights down and the Christmas Fig lights on, light a pine-scented holiday candle, turn on a holiday jazz mix, and feel a rush of warmth. It’s not the Christmas spectacle of my childhood, but it is its own tiny magic.

Yesterday I saw a man in a full Santa suit on a motorbike, a little Rudolph in his sidecar. I was cruising by in a taxi and so couldn’t take a photo, but just recalling it now makes me smile. I dislike winter — I’m a summer baby through and through — but there is something about the little delights that pop up in dark seasons that feel all the more precious.

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts the other day (hello to my favorite murderinos, iykyk) and one of the hosts mentioned that her therapist told her: “don’t borrow anxiety from the future.” Christmas, for me, is often a time of borrowing anxiety from the future. It’s going to be over, and the New Years Eve will be over, and then it’s just… January. Still winter, still dark, still dreary, but the lights come down, the tree gets chucked, and we look forward to, what, February? That’s even worse! I find I’m not fully able to enjoy this shiny-silver part of winter because I already gearing up for the is-this-over-yet slog of January into February into March (March! I hate March).

This year, I’m trying not just to enjoy the spectacle (and wow is Christmas in Hong Kong a spectacle) but to pull in a little forced fallowness. I generally struggle to sit still; I love to plan and scheme and move and push forward. If I am not in forward motion, I feel stuck, even like I’m moving in reverse. “Neutral” is not a gear I operate in.

And yet: Little grows in constantly-tilled soil.

Days in the northern hemisphere are getting longer, but the days are still short, the nights still long. Even here in Hong Kong, where the daylight differences between winter and summer aren’t so dramatic, it’s still mostly dark when I wake up. Evenings are chilly and there’s no heat in my building, so I’m wrapped up in sweaters and blankets. It feels cozy, to the extent that southeast Asia ever feels cozy, which is more cold-and-damp than fireplace-hygge.

And I feel very tired. Fall was intense: I worked a lot, I created a lot, my life changed a lot. I followed an election through a crest of hope and a crash of disappointment. I am waiting for what is to come from my home country, borrowing so much anxiety from the future I feel like I’m maxing out an unlimited credit line. I am tired in part because my life is pretty full-on right now and I’m actually not sleeping enough, and I am tired in part because these colder, slower, darker seasons feel heavy and fatiguing. I was up very late the other night, and light was still coming through the window of my apartment building — this light was the very yellow light from other people’s apartments, people who were also, for whatever reason, up in the middle of the night. When I’m trying to sleep, I’m annoyed at the lights that manage to sneak through my blackout shades. When I’m awake, though, and wandering like a ghost through a still apartment in the single-digit hours of the night, I look out a curtainless window and feel pleased to live in a city where the lights never go off.

The thing about the winter solstice is that while the promise of longer days is technically true, initially, each day is only longer by a less than a minute. That’s it: Mere extra seconds of sunlight. This is still, for the most part, a season of darkness. And how nice, to sit in the dark, and notice how the light creeps in.

Winter Poem

Nikki Giovanni

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kiss
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

xx Jill