Until my recent move to Greenfield, I lived in the backwoods of New Hampshire on an off-grid solar homestead at the end of a dirt road. It made me appreciate many things, and the arrival of the dark cold time of the year was one of them.

On a recent night it was below zero — again. It’s been cloudy for days and it’s the dark time of year. Low amperage on our off-grid solar system begged either the growl of the generator or an energy fast, so for the first time we chose the fast. We turned off computers and electric lights, and lit candles in the kitchen and on the table at dinnertime. As we ate, everything seemed to soften into its true form and mystery in the golden light.

Details disappeared, edges blended, shadows deepened. Our faces took on new beauty in the glow and even the plain healthy food tasted better. It was cozy magic, like being held gently within the natural cycle of the long winter night.

After dinner my partner and I brought a candle back to the kitchen counter to wash dishes, then carried our traveling light to the living room and curled up together on the sofa.

“Let’s read to each other,” I suggested, as we decided how to occupy our evening, and we did, holding the book in the soft light and resisting the impulse to slip on the handy LED brightness of our battery headlamps.

It felt like stepping back into slow time as the pace and distractions of our solar electric life melted away. We don’t have television, but even the evening compulsion to check the plethora of emails that arrive each day, catch up with the alternative news sites or watch a DVD disappeared. I packed logs into the cook stove while my partner yawned and taking a candle with him, climbed to the loft to go to bed early, which he never ordinarily does.

Not ready for sleep, I pulled the rocker close to the wood stove and sat staring into the changing orange flames — caught in the age-old trancelike human fascination with fire. Even with our sparse electrical lives here on this New Hampshire homestead, the short chance to live beyond electricity had proved unexpectedly calming, clearing and natural.

As I rocked with darkness gathered around me, I experienced a glorious sense of freedom and a deep connection to the long view of human history. Over the last hundred years — a mere two or three generations along a chain of 10,000 — we have been lured deeper and deeper still into the electrical web until we now think of its convenience as absolute necessity. The fact is my own mother, born in 1912, grew up without it on a farm in rural North Carolina. In her stories of childhood I never felt any sense of deprivation.

But when the grid goes down today, panic ensues. It’s front page news. People scramble around wondering how to keep warm and how to cool food or cook it, and what about water?

Most survive with the temporary electrical transfusion of a gas generator or if the lack of electricity persists, they give up and head for a shelter. Few sit back and view the forced reversion to more natural cycles of human experience as positive and even magical.

Light and dark. It’s been that way on our turning earth forever. I remember being afraid of the dark as a child. Like most kids, I invented monsters that lived under the bed. But maybe this early face-to-face relationship with darkness was a healthy thing. In their bedroom today, my grandsons have a nightlight, plastic stars that shine on the wall, and a magic turtle that stays lit all night casting its watery green reflections over the ceiling.  When I walked hand-in-hand with them into the night woods that surround our house, they hung back wide-eyed and frightened. Their relationship with the dark will need some mending.

Maybe that’s true for most of us. We often think of the dark, whether the dark of the moon or the dark wintertime of the year, as a negative, a time of contraction, of secrets, of the unknown, the irrational, of death.  And yet it also contains within it the mystery of regeneration and rebirth, of inspiration, visions and insight. It is the time when the veils between the worlds grow thin. The creative womb of darkness is as necessary to the complete cycle of life as the light.

Electricity has helped us to obliterate the dark and forget its gifts. Everywhere we go we see the lights of a commercial culture in the holiday of lights. The use of electricity, as wonderful as it can be, forces us into a state of separation, whether we choose to know it or not.

We live at the end of a sparsely populated dirt road up a half-mile driveway. It’s solar or nothing for us, but I will say that my partner lived with a few gaslights and a hand well pump for years before I came along and demanded some basic conveniences.

I sometimes wonder if it might be healthy for the world to begin to experience the disconnect from electric lights little by little? Kind of like Meatless Mondays. Turn off the computer. Go to bed early. Have a candlelight dinner. Use the microwave and wide screen less.

I yawned as I rocked, the night fire settling down to burn for hours.

Before bed I crossed the dark living room and stood at the window. When the lights are on, the windows only give us back our own reflections. It’s a kind of encirclement.With the lights off, I was able to see out into the wide world beyond the house — see the blue lace of shadows on the snow as the half moon rose among the trees and the stars twinkling on bare branches. I heard how the low rush of windy winter silence compares to noisy summer evenings filled with the call of loons on Goose Pond, the song of crickets and the conversation of barred owls.I thought about the deer hunkered down in their lay under the hemlocks that I discovered when snowshoeing the other day.

So head out into the dark, a choice that no longer seems radical, but rational. And who can say that respect and praise for the fertile mystery of darkness is not a good thing

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