Leaning toward the light

I grew up in a place that had light to spare.

The plains of West Texas are always burnished and sometimes scorched by the sun, which stretches for miles across that wide sky. Clouds, even massive thunderheads, often feel weak and insignificant by comparison. I love (and miss) those sunsets of orange and pink and fiery gold, smudged at the edges with purple clouds, the silhouettes of pump jacks sharp and black against the brightness.

It’s different up here, in my new adopted city. (This is the undercurrent, the bass drumbeat, of the last two years and three months. Everything, from the accents I hear on the street to my commute on public transport, is different.)

In West Texas, even in the dead of winter, it rarely gets dark before six o’clock. The sun, though milder and feebler than its fierce summer self, still makes almost daily appearances, and it starts to get warm again in March. Here in Boston, the evenings grow short in late October, as the dark starts to come down early. The cold, dark days persist well into April, often accompanied by snow. I love the mild Northeast summers and the glorious colors of fall, but winter poses a challenge. I want to hibernate, like a bear, but I can’t: I have to venture out, to work and church and the grocery store. I have to find a way to get through it.

With my third Northeastern winter approaching, I bought a light box, one of those bulky plastic lamps that emits dazzling, semi-fluorescent light, along with invisible ions which will (presumably) recalibrate my body clock and insulate me from the edgy, flat, almost weepy feeling I get on gray and gloomy days. I’ve been flipping it on every morning for several weeks, and swallowing a small Vitamin D pill daily. I think it’s working, though I’m not sure if it will help me when we get to February.

The best thing, of course, is to walk outside into the real sunlight, on days when the blue sky stretches wide overhead, so the trees glow more brightly orange and gold against it. To tip my head back and let the sunlight bathe my face. To soak in the real light, to store up as much of it as I can, whether it comes in through the blinds as I eat breakfast or shines into my eyes as I walk across the Common to work.

Of course, not all the days bring that welcome brightness. Or they bring it in glimpses and flashes, not enough to soak up or enjoy. We are still at the beginning of winter, and we are weeks away from the solstice, after which the days begin, however slowly, to lengthen again.

Sometimes I wish I weren’t so sensitive to the rhythms of the seasons, when this particular change in rhythm renders me both lethargic and vulnerable. I wish I could do without the pills and the box that emits synthetic light. I wish I didn’t require quite so many pick-me-ups, so many cups of tea or bouquets of bright flowers or other winter survival tricks, to get me through this long, dark season.

But this, for better or worse, is how I’m made. Even if the box and the pills don’t erase the darkness, even if I still shiver as I walk in the cold, it helps. It helps to lean toward the light, wherever it happens to come from these days.

How do you lean toward the light in wintertime?

Advertisement