Resilient Goshen: Entering Darkness as the Seasons Change
GOSHEN, Ind. — We are entering darkness. The season is shifting around us. Halloween, Día de los Muertos and All Saints’ Day remind us of this. The end of daylight saving time each fall, bringing an earlier sunset, offers another immediate reminder. And, of course, there are other tangible indicators of the growing darkness: leaves changing and falling, gathering cold overnight that creeps into the daytime.
We mark this change with a combination of playful fun, morbid fascination and serious contemplation. All of these feel appropriate. While the nights have grown increasingly longer than the days since the fall equinox in September, we now really begin to feel the weight of this change, physically and probably psychically, as the state of the natural world becomes noticeably different.
Preparing ourselves and our communities to move into greater darkness and cold is as important now, in the 21st century, as it ever has been.
Trees Prepare for the Darkness
Of course, I’m noticing trees and the ways they prepare for the lean winter months ahead.
Their most obvious adaptation is the loss of leaves among deciduous trees. While dropping temperatures play a role, lessening daylight is the main driver. The primary work of leaves is to create sugar through photosynthesis. But as daylight decreases, photosynthesis becomes less and less efficient.
Eventually, the photosynthetic payback is not worth the resources required to maintain leaves. So the trees draw the green pigment chlorophyll back into the branch tips to reuse next year, revealing other pigments: red, yellow, orange and pink. Then they allow the leaves to die and drop.
Without leaves, these trees will have no new sources of sugar until next spring. So growth slows and essentially stops. Equally important to dropping leaves, trees send excess sugar from the summer down toward and into their root systems, where they store it over winter, a cool, dark place to preserve food not unlike a refrigerator.
These stores will prove crucial for new leaf and flower growth in the spring, so trees must maintain them through the dark, cold months. Trees now begin to enter a deepening dormancy, allowing their life processes to largely come to a standstill. From here on, they take the guise of dead trees, trusting the evolutionary instinct that light and warmth will eventually return.
Animals Prepare for Winter
Animals all around us also follow ancient instincts as they prepare for the darkness.
Squirrels are easy to notice, eating, gathering and storing acorns, walnuts and hickory nuts. They fatten up, scout and build nests. Nonmigratory birds do much of the same, while migratory birds move across our region, stopping for a few days to feed or rest before moving on toward warmer and brighter places to the south.
Much more reclusive, I’ve watched as a new fox den has appeared in a sand hill behind our home. At the foot of young catalpa and black walnut trees, first one and then a second hole appeared. A bit of scat and fur lets me guess who is at work here, and I wonder how deep the den goes and what other preparations for winter are taking place inside.
What Does Entering Darkness Do to Us?
What does the darkness do to us? Does the anticipation of dark and cold trigger something for us? What innate instincts come to the surface?
For instance, is it just commercial opportunism that floods the neighborhood with sugar at this moment, or are there also some deeper social-physical realities being expressed?
And, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, the traditions of Halloween encourage a playful entrance into seasonal darkness through trick-or-treating, alongside macabre and even frightening explorations of mortality through haunted houses and horror movies.
Does the deepening dark elicit aspects of this response, individually and communally, a kind of contemplation of the cycles of life and death?
Much of modern society allows us to bypass the greatest challenges of the coming winter: warmth, shelter and food. Nevertheless, unless we migrate with the birds, we have no choice other than to hunker down and endure with the rest of the natural world around us.
We have to shelter in place. That requires some preparation: digging out warmer clothes, jackets and coats, piling up firewood and checking furnaces. There is anticipation and excitement, for sure, but there is also a kind of pulling in, gathering what we need to survive, an inner contemplation of what winter can do to us.
For some in our community, those preparations are much more difficult. We think of people who have no home and few resources and wonder how they will make it through.
The darkness is coming. There is no way to avoid it. But we are moving into it together. Our traditions at this time of year, from secular to sacred, I think, emphasize this important truth: Winter is coming, but we are not alone.
Aaron Sawatsky-Kingsley serves as Goshen’s director of Environmental Resilience and joined the City as its first urban forester in 2006. Readers can find this column bi-weekly on Saturdays in The Goshen News.