One-Liner Wednesday: darkness

The future is dark. Is this the darkness of the tomb – or of the womb?

Valerie Kaur

Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays! Find out more here: https://lindaghill.com/2022/06/15/one-liner-wednesday-one-of-those-days-3/

Waking up in the dark

I am not a fan of Daylight Saving Time, which started today in most of the United States.

It is not an accurate name. The amount of daylight is determined by astronomy, not by clocks. Naming the time of sunrise and sunset differently does not change the time between those two events.

What most annoys me, though, is waking up in the dark again. I had just gotten to the point where I was waking up to the light of dawn, which I find more energizing, and now I am instantly back into mid-winter waking-to-darkness.

This is not helped by the fact that we are having a cold snap and may soon have the most snow we have had in weeks, depending on the track of a developing nor’easter.

I know that many people will argue that having it be light longer in the evening makes up for the dark mornings, but we had already been able to eat dinner in natural light, although I admit that we tend to eat dinner on the early side.

By June, it won’t be fully dark until after 9 PM, which makes our usual 10 PM bedtime feel like we are children, being put to bed as soon as evening falls.

Daylight Saving Time, especially the current US implementation, also causes issues with long-distance communications. E’s daily call time with her employer in Hawai’i will shift. B’s daily 6 AM conference call with colleagues in India (thankfully) stays at 6 AM for him, but his India team has to change the time at which they call. Because the US extended the dates of DST, for the next three weeks, US time will be out of sync with many of the countries that observe DST using the original dates.

It would be so much simpler if we just dropped the whole concept and left our clocks alone.

Daylight doesn’t care, but I do.

How do you feel about Daylight Saving Time? Is it observed where you are?

Light, Mercy, and Jubilee

Yesterday for SoCS I wrote about whether my chorus would “gird” or “put” on the armour of light. This morning at church the theme was light overcoming darkness, progressing to the concept of Jubilee and the upcoming Jubilee of mercy which Pope Francis announced on Friday.

The deacon who preached spoke about how this Jubilee calls us to welcome everyone without exception – and to not wait for the official start of the Jubilee on December 8, 2015 to do so.

My mind turned to how Jesus welcomed in the most profound way those who were marginalized in his society and faith – those who were ill or disabled, those without financial resources, foreigners, women, all those who were looked down on by the powers that be of his day.

As a woman who is a feminist and has chosen to stay within the church, knowing that it fails so often to fully reflect the radical gospel call of Jesus, this jubilee call is both an opportunity and a potential source of disappointment. While Francis has spoken often of a poor church for the poor and has championed causes of peace and social justice, he does not understand the profound ways in which the Catholic church has marginalized women and failed to challenge temporal powers that oppress them. Many other clergy in the church are openly dismissive of women’s gifts to the church and the world, unless those gifts are motherhood, domestic pursuits, or vowed religious life, preferably contained by convent walls.

Will this be the year when the church finally realizes that the call of jubilee to set the captive free applies to women both in its midst and in the world? Will the men of the church finally recognize that women are made in the divine image as much as they are?

Monday micropoem

Return to Standard Time

Rising this morning
to gathering dawn
rather than
pitch darkness

Darkness

We flew into Hilo last night, picked up our rental car, and drove to our home for the next two nights, Volcano Guest House, which is not far from the entrance to Volcanoes National Park. We are staying in “The Upstairs” of the main house, which is a conversion of the bedrooms of the now-grown children of the house into a two-bedroom mini-apartment.

The house where we are staying and the cottages and other outbuildings are built to be as self-sustaining as possible, with solar hot water heating (with electrical back-up for rainy days or heavy use), rain water catchment, and wood stoves, with electric space heaters and extra blankets and electric mattress pads for chilly nights.

One of the accoutrements is a (hand-cranked) flashlight. That seemed a bit curious, but last night we understood why it is necessary.

Last night, we experienced the most darkness we had seen since the flood in September 2011 left us with no electricity for several days. Given that our bodies aren’t adjusted to Hawai’i Standard Time yet, we awoke about 2 AM, which constitutes sleeping in until 8 on Eastern Daylight Time, to total darkness. Because it is raining, there was no moonlight or starlight. There are no streetlights and the Volcano Guest House buildings are carved into the rain forest with as small a footprint as possible.

Coincidentally, I have read been reading/hearing a lot about darkness lately. The darkness near here that makes the Mauna Kea observatory one of the finest in the world. The threat to the Kopernik Observatory in our hometown from the light pollution of gas wellpads and flaring right across the border in PA. The Dark Skies initiative that reserves certain places to retain as much of their natural darkness as possible. The imagery of the light coming into the darkness at Easter Vigil services. A cover article in a recent Time magazine on Barbara Brown Taylor and the spiritual lessons of darkness.

Enveloped in the darkness, we were able to get back to sleep, awaking with the still-rainy dawn to the songs of unfamiliar birds.