Lights

   We are all constantly bathed in light these days. We live in a world where everything is endlessly turned on, awaiting our use. There is a light on the microwave, the TV, the clock radio, and the computer screen, iPods, iPads and iPhones. Modems are incessantly blinking and car alarm systems are forever wanting us to know they are on the job. Sensor lights are all over the place and come on even when we don't want them to.
   At night, padding around the house, I am able to peer into rooms and see boys that are finally asleep and yet still awash in the glow of their electronics. I come to bed at night and Doralyn's face is illuminated as she checks final e-mails. Sometimes she is already asleep in the darkness but when I plug in my phone to re-charge it for the night our bed is bathed, once again, in light.
   Lasers show us the straight line to cut on or whether some thing's level or not. They tease our cats.
   It is not easy to be in total darkness any more. It is almost as if someone somewhere has decided we shouldn't be, that perhaps it wasn't wise or prudent.

   I occasionally would welcome total darkness. I have the feeling, somehow, that it might actually be regenerative. Let us sleep and let us grow while we sleep. Let us not wake up, roll over and be accosted by glowing numbers on displays reminding us just where the world is now, on both its flight around the sun and its never-ending rotation on its own axis. Let us not wake up and be reminded about a world where people are just waiting to be in touch with us from behind their own tiny, blinking screens.
   We have a light in our living room that comes on when the daylight disappears and turns off long after we normally go to bed. It is something we ourselves programmed, so that we would never be in the dark, as if that were a bad thing. I enjoy the time when it goes off more than when it comes on, I enjoy the bedtime chore of walking about the house, turning off the lights.
   Occasionally, the moon provides the largest source of light and it is one of my favourite kinds. It is one of the lights we are supposed to live by, along with the sun, which I also welcome. Light from actual fire is wonderful--warmth and illumination is its only purpose, it has no hidden agenda.
   I understand that it cannot always be dark and, of course, wouldn't want it to be. There are healing qualities to light as well and there is nothing quite so good as coming out of what seems like a long dark winter and into the light of spring. More than anything, it is the man-made illumination and its omnipresence I rail against.