How I Learned to Love the Dark: Everyday Magic, Day 1,135

Wonderful night photo by Stephen Locke, also the cover of my first novel (used with permission)

When I was a little kid, the dark terrified me. At least, that's what I remember, but I think now I was just a night owl afraid of being alone, so I would pull myself up to standing in my crib and cry until someone came in. I didn't yet know how to befriend the dark I would come to love so much later on.

When the dark encompassed the sky, I came alive, my little but fierce mind spinning on the axle of imagination. I remember singing and jumping on my bed for hours, delighting in the flower power sheets (Peter Maxx was big in the 60s). Night was full-surge awake and alive, and going to sleep at 7 p.m., especially when it was still light out, was an affront to my nervous system.

Yet I was also afraid of what could happen in the dark for a long time, haunted by recurrent nightmares of giant metallic and angular robots coming for me as well as other terrors when I fell asleep. As I got older, I feared walking from our front door to the curb when it was my turn to drag the trash out, wondering if I would attacked by fangs and claws (having watched some horror films as well as the show Dark Shadows).

A lot of people I know slept fine as kids but struggle with insomnia as they get older. For me, it's been the opposite. The older I get, the more I fall in love with the dark, not just coming alive but coming to trust what we can only see and know after sunset, and so not fighting it when I get drowsy.

How did this happen? I'm not sure, but I know it's rooted in being more infatuated with the sky over time, especially when the darkness built its case enough for the stars to burn through. I adore the rising and growing moon as well as the first sliver coming back to us. I'm a connoisseur of cloud travel over the moon and stars, especially the occasional pink and golden rings around the moon. In summer, I pace the back deck at 2 a.m. to take in the luscious air (sometimes the only tolerable air after a searing day). In winter, I duck outside to see the stars even brighter in the stark sky.

Look, it's the sky at night!

But there are other reasons I've learned to love the dark. I know more about what's really out there, nothing so much with fangs but, when it comes to where I live, chiggers and ticks, which can make a body miserable. I've also experienced so much good darkness with others that lay the ground for befriending the dark. Of course there's the in-the-bedroom kind of possibilities, but I'm thinking more of long walks with friends at night, singing and telling stories around campfires, thrilling in the first lightning bugs and soon after, when the fields around our home fill with green lights threading their stories (and mating signals) through the tall grass.

Then there's all the metaphoric darkness. The bad things I feared would happen happened....or didn't. The seemingly unsurvivable things spent their seasons with me, as they do with all of us, and I was lucky to come out of both an aggressive case of breast cancer and a rare bout of eye cancer, not completely unscathed and with a few less body parts but enough good health returning and growing. Some people I didn't want to die died. Many didn't or not yet. Projects, jobs, gigs, and groups I thought would go on forever ended...or not or not yet or maybe never.

"How old are you?" my grand nephew asked me recently.

"66," I answered.

"You are so old," he replied. "You have lines all over your face."

"That's because I'm lucky, and I hope you're lucky enough one day to be my age and even older."

That's what I believe. The darkness gives us deeper ways of seeing and being, a lot more wrinkles and wounds, a lot less capacity in some ways too. Or maybe I'm talking about aging. But whatever it is that takes us through the spaces between light has as much or even more to teach us. I was innately excited about the dark when I was little, and I still am, but I know a trick or two now about surrendering to it, even giving myself over to sleep far more readily (although such things can be unpredictable).

A few weeks, I was watched the stars with close friends, Ken pointing out constellations as we sat on our back deck. There are things you can only see -- including old light (even light that's no longer lit) from light years away -- in the dark. There's illumination of the past and an expansive reminder that we don't know what the future will bring, but there's also this: We can love each other and our willingness to be together and be awake in the dark.