“So, what is it that you like about colored lights?” he asks me this mid-December: we are celebrating our first Christmas together as committed partners, and we’ve just sought out and bought three sets of solar powered seasonal lights.
Clearly they are meant for outdoors, which is a new experience for me; I’ve never wanted to worry about cords and plugs before: these need neither. The rectangular solar panels will gather up the day’s sunlight, store it, and send it back out into the night’s darkness.
We drape one string along the fence in the courtyard, hang the four snowflakes from the awning above the south facing front window. This leaves the third set. It is meant for the Denver home, for next year. But I confiscate it. I want to see if the solar panel will work inside. For it is indoors that I most enjoy Christmas lights.
I especially love sitting in the dark with the gentle glow of colored lights to focus my winter meditations. This act connects me with our ancient ancestors who watched and worried while the sun’s light diminished and the earth grew cold and barren in the deepening seasonal darkness. That early humans devised symbolic ways to name, frame, contain, and explain this phenomena marked the start of our emergence out of animal consciousness.
Historical responses to winter’s darkness decorate my home and include a Hindu Diwali star, a Jewish menorah, and a Solstice candle along with the single strand of Christmas lights I purchased while in seminary to decorate the floor plant in the window of my dorm room.
Now I add the string of solar powered lights and spend all the daylight hours repositioning the panel the as the house moves around the sun. Eventually, using a tiny reading light, my partner devises a way to clip the panel onto a wooden screen that gets lots of afternoon sun from the clearstory windows.
We are fascinated as the lights turn themselves on as the darkness descends, those inside the house sooner than those on the outside. The snowflakes turn on with the sun’s setting and glow a delicate white pattern all evening. In fact, they are still when I get up in the early morning darkness! They turn off with the first rays of dawn.
The other outdoor ones turn off sometime during the night; exactly when they go out is a mystery we’ll have to stay awake to solve, not unlike children spying on Santa Claus!
The inside set shuts off a few hours into the evening, and I soon learn to manually turn them off before they run out of energy, so there will be some light left for my early morning meditation. I‘ve spread them beneath the juniper branches we brought from the Denver yard and propped up to look like a Christmas Tree next to the east window. The lights seem to grow dim in the gathering dawn, then suddenly shut off. But if I put the solar panel face down, the lights get fooled and come back on. During the day, my partner experiments with powering up the panel by holding it under his desk lamp.
We’ve become as two children playing within the wonder of the season!
If nothing else, we are growing more and more in awe of our sun as the source of all light and life upon our precious planet. Unlike our earliest human cousins, we know that our star fuses hydrogen atoms into helium and that it is the light from that process we see during each day, thus taking us back to the beginning of Time when all the hydrogen that would ever exist came forth into being 300,000 years AFTER the great Inflation of Space (also known as the Big Bang).
How amazing to realize that light from some fourteen billion years ago is just now reaching us, and empowering these colored lights!
And to wonder whether my quiet reflecting in their silent glow is replaying that moment from back in the Pleistocene Age when, in the words of geologist-theologian Teilhard de Chardin, “something within people turned back on itself, and, so to speak, took and infinite leap forward” (John McPhee, Basin and Range, pg. 130).
For we the people are the self- reflective species!
And this is the main season for reflection.
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