!%?#!?! This #!@%&!!ing Darkness

In my youth I was always told: it's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

This might explain why yesterday I felt compelled to pull on my ratty blue jeans and my tattered Chubby and Tubby shirt, load up my pockets with zip ties and twine and the short-handled screwdriver, and head out into the rain to hang up the Christmas lights.

I should explain that this fall the darkness has gathered more quickly for me than usual, and has settled thicker and closer around my heart. It's not just the damn school reports, or tax cuts for the rich, or the dearth of gainful employment I'll be facing in January, or the incessant rain -- though none of that helps. For various reasons I won't go into here, life has weighed heavy on me of late.

So I've especially appreciated the luminous family of snowmen that appeared over Thanksgiving on a lawn down the road, and last week I loved seeing the menorahs in all the neighbors' windows. Friday afternoon I spotted a giant inflatable Santa outside a Christmas tree lot, and I started thinking: if it's going to get dark at four o'clock (which it is, let's face it, for another month at least) a front porch blazing with color would be a more cheerful thing to come home to than a dark, gloomy one piled with moldering soccer gear. It was time to dig the rope lights out of the basement.

Sure, it was pouring -- but it wasn't like there was a better day coming to hang the Christmas lights any time soon.

Simon helped me sketch out a plan for the porch, based on a pilot project we had developed in an upstairs window the night before. But he quickly lost interest in being cold and wet, so after a while I sent him back inside and proceeded with the implementation phase on my own.

This mostly involved balancing on the porch rail with one leg hooked around a pillar, leaning out into the rain with the hammer, and pounding nails into the beam above my head. It was grueling work (if only I'd stuck with that yoga class!), plagued by gravity-induced setbacks, misplaced tools, and damp bits of spiderweb dangling in my eyes.

Rope lights are a tiresome medium. They kept slithering down into the bushes, or wanting to coil left when I needed them to curve right, and the little plastic brackets that hold them in place kept snapping in half, usually after I'd spent fifteen precarious minutes cantilevered around an awkward corner, screwing them in with one hand while clinging to an overhead beam with the other.

Then there was the rain (did I mention the rain?) which spattered my glasses and ran down my collar and made the porch rail dangerously slick. I must have jumped off and clambered back up that rail a thousand times, because I couldn't really see how things were turning out unless I clomped down the stairs and took in the big picture from the sidewalk. It occurred to me as I knelt in a puddle on the roof of the porch and leaned over the edge to hoist up a loop of lights, that I might as well just lie face down in it -- I couldn't possibly get any wetter. By noon I was not quite half-way done, and had discovered that my red lights were about eleven feet short. I was not feeling festive.

A trip to Lowe's along construction-clogged Rainier Ave did not improve my mood. Nor did a second trip three hours later, when it turned out the tree house portion of the project would require yet another pack of red lights, plus an extension cord.

At four-thirty this afternoon, darkness found me hunched in the tree house, wiping tears of frustration out of my eyes with a soggy sleeve while wind-blown branches raked at my hair. As I grimly uncoiled another 18 feet of lights and eyed the massive, moss-covered oak limb I was about to straddle, it struck me that I'd been pretty steadily cursing the Darkness (and the rain, and my numb, fumbling fingers) all afternoon. God damn the trap door that dumped a faceful of rain on me when I opened it from below, and nearly took my thumb off when I closed it from above. Fuck the cardboard box of nails that suddenly dissolved as I picked it up off the rickety, rotting bench I was using as a stepladder. And the wretched extension cord that just dropped into the ivy twenty feet below me can burn in hell.

So, for that matter, can crabbiness and laziness and red tape and cynicism and despair, along with every thing and any one that's ever stood in the way of progress and good ideas and truth and peace and the triumph of justice and the creation of beauty. Why on earth was I doing this? What the hell was the goddamn point? I'd be better off curled up in bed with a nice hot cup of hemlock tea. And yet...

And yet: six hours of this miserable, painful struggle had somehow produced this:

Not to mention this:

When I finally got myself untangled from the oak tree and back on solid ground, the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and I found myself smiling at the goofy, cheery, glowing faces I had conjured up.

I think most people walking down our street will assume these faces were the work of someone centered and joyful, buoyed by her own inner light -- an optimist, at the very least.  I wish I could be that person. Really, I do.

I know it's the season to be jolly -- the time for cookies and carols, for gathering to celebrate whatever form of Light in the Dark speaks to each of us: the oil in the temple, the blazing yule, the Columbia City Tree Lighting (with or without an actual tree), the Star of Wonder, the Holy Infant laid in a manger.

But at times like this, when I'm struggling with demons and fending off despair, I comfort myself with the thought that it's not technically a Light in the Dark if you've already got the candles blazing and the carols blaring, if you're surrounded by loved ones sipping eggnog, with presents piled up under a glittering tree. Sometimes it's important to remember the side of Christmas that isn't about being cozy and stuffed and warm by the fire. The part that's about going into labor far from home, with no room at the inn -- about being cold and miserable and scared and in pain, and hoping against hope that morning will find you still in one piece.

You'd never know it to look at them, but my silly rope light faces came out of that sacred power that can only be found at the bottom of the barrel, at the end of the rope, in the depths of the squid pit. They are talismans born of my mysterious, unshakable determination (it's almost involuntary, honestly) not to succumb to frustration and despair. They are my attempt to convince myself there's meaning and hope out there somewhere, even if I have to drag myself out in the rain and fashion it with my bare hands out of rope lights and zip ties and sheer, grim force of will. And when I reach my coldest, darkest days, I know those blobby blue eyes will stare my demons down, and those glowing red mouths will open wide and say, Fuck you, Darkness. I will outlast you. I will live to see the brighter days of Spring.