Sunset at Ghost Ranch, photo by Kati Van Aernum

The light of the moon and stars... give us a sense of our own reality in the vastness of the infinite universe. It is thanks to all of this that our thoughts grow lucid and our imagination regains its freedom to feel capable of achieving everything that our hearts desire and aspire to. (Jordi Savall, Invocation A La Nuit)

This morning the full moon is on the floor of my sitting room– making me reluctant to turn on any lights. There is no other light like moonlight.

I look forward to this time of year, heading toward the winter solstice. It is the pull toward night, seeing the stars and milky way, and the silence of the desert that draws me back to Ghost Ranch, where I have been going for over twenty years.

Full moon at Ghost Ranch, photo by Kati Van Aernum

I love to be out walking before dawn in the desert– the moon perched above the butte in a sky filled with stars.

We live in a time where we must seek out the darkness and silence, as the differentiation between day and night grows distant and thin. How many of us see the moon and stars in the midst of perpetual electric lights and noise?

Thankfully, it is still possible to find the night and silence, and to drink it like spring water. Many artists have reflected on the power of giving oneself to the mystery of night. Bill Viola said: If you want to experience the essential mystery or secret life of things then be there with them, awake, when the rest of the world is sleeping. The darkness is filled with presences, and a silence that has echoes of things forgotten and remembered. It is the time to let thoughts and images, like notes from a song, rise to the surface. It is a time to declare that one does not need more stimulation, but time to integrate and make sense of what we are already filled with.

The coming of winter and longer nights awakens the desire for time away– to go inward and find the illumination that dark and silence offer. There is time to rediscover the connection between our internal image and manifestation, to kindle the fire of imagination.

How do you make use of this time of longer nights, and the pull to go inward?