Coming home from work on an icy Tuesday evening, it’s so tempting to change into jammies and grab a book and a warm cup of tea.

The darkness looks daunting and always, it holds the unknown.

Yup, nearly every night it’s tough to start out, whether it’s on snowshoes, spikes, or just regular walking shoes. But once going, and once that first hill is topped, there’s absolutely no regret.

And of course, there’s also the fact that these walks make Caleb so damn happy!

How different the world looks at night, especially when you’re going slowly and pausing to savor.

How enveloped in quiet and darkness you feel, stopping periodically to look around…

How thoughts come and go, as the headlamp sweeps from object to object.

You notice the singularity of objects that might go unnoticed in daylight.

You see isolated tree trunks, stolid, solitary, and mysterious.

How the contours of the land look different — stripped down and undulating. From the top of the Maple Grove, I can see Pat’s Peak, brightly lit in the distance.

Then there are the stars and the moon.

And gazing left and right as I go, I see so many places where no one has been yet.

Just snow. No people, no deer, no little rodents, no Caleb, no creatures of the night.

Not yet…

As the moon gets brighter this month, perhaps I’ll venture out without light, as Wendell Berry advises in his wonderful poem, “To Know the Dark.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

But for now, I’m using my light to find my way home, and sure as the North Star, it always does.