In the grimlins

As I write, today is the first day past the solstice—that moment of suspension, of the sun at its highest point in the northern hemisphere, surveying all that it touches in its moment of stasis. Star stasis. Static.

People often ask northern latitude dwellers about the cold, the winter, the dark days and nights, how hard it must be to endure having so little light. And there are times when that perfection of an acronym—a sad light if there ever was one—has been on my desk in winter. But in truth, I think there is a lot more that contributes to feelings of seasonal affective disorder than a lack of light. People have lived in all latitudes of the earth unaided by electricity for millennia. The maladies that affect us are not so much of the season, but because the world insists on living so out of sync with the land and latitude. 

And so while I celebrated the solstice day, I confess I also celebrated because we can look forward to the shortening days, that the dark will slowly return to these skies. This point in the year tends to bring a feeling of exhalation, a sense of assurance that there will be some respite from the light and energy.

This world would have us believe that light is something always to be wanted, desired at all cost and abundance. I don’t doubt that part of my weariness of the long sunlight and no night is a result of an electrified world that insists on extending work days into an artificial never-night, a barrage of bright instant light made so easy to come by whether needed or not.

Some of the first clocks had a kind of canny, built-in protection that demanded a pause through the night hours of darkness: sun clocks only worked in sunlit hours. When the sun set below the horizon, time for the day stopped. At least a time that could be measured. There’s perhaps something to be said for hours that follow the light-and-dark’s lead, with hours stretching relative to their ebb and flow. Hours were once like that—measured according to splitting up the day and night equally. The uniform regimen of sixty minutes per hour we live by now is divorced from the earth’s rotation, and thus the different lands and latitudes we live on. In medieval times in the Northern Hemisphere, for example, daytime hours were longer in summer than in winter, measured in twelve parts/hours between sunrise and sunset.

I wonder what it would be like to live more in sync with the light and dark or lack of it as it arises—to perhaps not be so bothered that sleep won’t come no matter the use of an eye mask and black-out curtains. I suspect I would be less addled by the sun’s high, insistent zenith if this world was not so conditioned to always respond to light with a call to work or to do.

The bright days and short, short twilights of the light this time of year are a gift, but an extreme one. It’s a punk rock time of year when the sun is so fed up with the clock it rebels against its order by lighting up every corner of the land. Children are out playing until past 11 pm and it feels like the whole world no longer has any need for sleep. Hikes can begin at 6 pm, tents pitched at midnight. The sunlight becomes a spotlight, a more intense, focused heat from a sun that is so impossibly high it makes the leaves shine and refract. Fruit left in a window rots more quickly under the near-solstice sun’s intense, insistent gaze.

I used to tell myself I loved all of the light of summer, how good it felt to have energy, to be up and disregard the clock and not feel the effects of short sleep so greatly. The first return of the light in February always feels exhilarating, a move towards the equilibrium of equinox. But as the light grows five minutes a day afterward, it begins to feel like the days are being stretched taut, thin. There’s a manic energy to so much light. As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown to love the darker days, when the slant of light brings long shadows and the cool reflected light of Moon and stars in a dark sky—and if lucky a glimpse of the aurora. The time of year when it feels right to sleep, to be quiet, to settle in for the long night and able to hear yourself think.

People spend more time together in the darker night months, socializing in the dark when the day quiets and there is no longer the pressing call of to do or to be out. Daylight beckons so many away during the summer months that people here are rarely home, to take advantage of the daylight days. When there is truly so little darkness, it begins to feel exhausting. There’s a surrender and relief in knowing the truly dark nights are headed back to us.

I think of the summer solstice now as a time when the sun too can finally rest and work less. Trees are in full leaf, insects are emergent with wings, plants are emergent with blooms that will later turn to fruit. They too have made it to another full summer, and can now rest in satisfaction with their work and energy. We can thank the sun and let the dark begin to take up some of its space, let Moon return to share in the work of light and dark. To let passive, reflected light and thought begin a slow return. A whispered hush when we are so often told to hustle, to quiet the spinning thoughts of daylight into increasingly fuller, wider, and restful shadows. 

At this latitude (61), there is only a two-hour or so period of twilight—civil twilight is continuous between midnight and 4 am. The birds begin singing at around 2:45 am of late, singing to the sun to welcome its energetic insomnia.

I learned that there is a Scots word for these suspended twilights of high latitude summer, the faint light of a sun that rises and sets, but its light never leaves the sky:

…youths kindled torches…so that in the grimlins (faint light) of midnight the face of the hill was aglow with fiery haloes.¹

The grimlins. What a perfect word. A name for something that so deserves its own designation—the mark of a suspended twilight, the faint light—but that also shares the sound with both gloaming (another Scots-originating word for a different twilight, made popular by Robert Burns) and gremlins, goblins. Twilights and mysteries of dusky summer light. It feels like giving names to such elemental things, recognizing them is a way to offer respect. To thank the sun for its work, its pause, and to respond to the grimlins, the faint light, with the lighting of fires on midsummer, a way to offer back some of the heat we’ve been given. To assure the Sun that we recognize it is now his time to rest, that we will remember how to warm ourselves when he is no longer so high in our sky. 

Dark nights are a time when we can notice the quiet, be out of the busyness and glare of that spotlit light that implores us to do. The growing dark gives room to notice the hum of the land, the season, to not so easily dismiss what is around us—which is often too easy to do in the distracting light of June, when every view is crowded with well-lit details. The dark offers a narrowing of focus and long deep breaths. To let go of the tasks of daylight. To have room to see the world not only by the light of Sun, but also by Moon, starlight, and shadow. And to welcome the difference between.

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1. Hutton, Ronald. 2001. Stations of the Sun. Oxford University Press. p. 318