Monday late afternoon I was out for a run/hike in Ryan Park. It had been raining all day and was already quite dark when I set out from the parking lot (I had my light in my pocket, planning to run the last bit in the dark). All the leaves are down, so the woods are quite grey and twiggy (but beautiful in their way in winter), plus there was the misty sky and absent sun. When I got to the pond, I saw three enormous swans alternately gliding and feeding with their heads under water. I loved seeing them, their bright forms in all that accumulating darkness. Rain was falling hard at that point, and I continued past the pond, along the gravel road and then back into the woods to cross the arched bridge. At the bridge, it started to absolutely deluge, so wildly that I laughed out loud (it happens a lot, actually, that I laugh out loud when I run). The temperature was in the mid fifties, so it was warmish, and being in the downpour was delightful. There was something undeniably funny about being the lone, sodden human underneath all that rain. I’ve had similar experiences in summer when running in a hard shower, but it’s been a long time.
Something else happened, though. I noticed as I was going over the bridge that it was really darkening. I continued winding my way along the trail through the woods; eventually the path comes up behind some houses, and then the parking lot isn’t far from there. I don’t like starting out a run in the dark by myself, but ending one in the dark is different. I love the process of the woods getting dimmer, as long as I have the light in my pocket. Then I have a choice, which is to turn the light on or just stay in the deepening twilight and let my eyes adjust. I did eventually turn it on, but the batteries were on the weak side and so it didn’t make much of a difference; which gave me the opportunity to really look around at the forest and suddenly feel it more. I felt a shift, since I couldn’t discern as much with my eyes, to feeling the woods as a whole. It seemed a bit like disappearing, but also not. There was an unmistakeable merging, or submerging, of me within the forest, or a dissolving of boundaries. Words can’t really convey what happened all that well, since disappearing and appearing all at once can’t really be conceptualized, but there it is. I realized that being in the dark twilight like that, feeling those transitions, surrounded by the power of the woods, facilitated the dissolving of borders. It seems to me that this is something missing from contemporary life, the opportunity to be in the dark without lights of some kind; and that experience would have been entirely common once upon a time; and I’m guessing the experience, too, of dissolving and being part of something larger, the sensing of the magnitude of the natural world.