When was the last time you were in a coal mine? If you’re from northeastern Pennsylvania like me, you’ve taken at least two school field trips to the coal mines and perhaps went again as an adult with kids — yours or others — or you played tour guide for a boyfriend or college friend who’d come to visit.

If you’re the rest of the US population, unless you’ve been that boyfriend or friend visiting someone from NEPA, your answer is likely: never. And I'd go one step farther to bet that unless you're a mall Santa cracking jokes at little kids' expenses, coal hasn’t even crossed your mind. In which case, let me set the scene.

You load into a metal-framed cart with a bunch of strangers and descend into a hole in the ground. It's like a rollercoaster to nowhere, a railroad into sunken emptiness, a freefall into the void. It gets colder with every tink-tink-tink of the rusty metal wheels against the tracks and, regardless of the time of year, a burst of winter air hits your face as you plummet.

At this point, you might hear or feel cool drips releasing from the cavern’s roof. You might mistake the squeaky brakes for bats taking off in chaotic flight. You might feel echoes of all the men and children who lost their lives making a living unknowingly digging their own tombs, turning gangways into catacombs, and fueling a revolution in which industry would win out over humanity. You’ll see traces of the miners’ work in the tracks and the cracks — in this cavity where solid ground should be.

And once you’re down there, 300 feet below the earth’s surface, it's lights out and silence except for the haunting echo of your voice and the shallowness of your own breathing.

This is what the time between Halloween and Christmas, when we head into the shortest days and longest nights, feels like to me: a coal cart plunging into the naturally air-conditioned belly of the hollowed-out earth.

The fact that I live in one of the darkest places on earth — so dark that most countries have a telescope here — only emphasizes this feeling. And to really drive it home, just last week, the state of Hawai'i declared a state of emergency. Without much warning other than a few blustery days typical of this time of year, a nasty storm moved in, and suddenly, we were without power or water for three days.

I called the power company a few hours into the blackout; they didn't have our outage on their map, so they filed a special ticket for it. It seems we got the short end of the utility pole with what they call a "pocket outage." Meaning that others around us — even as close to us as one block away — were totally unaffected. It was only this block of this street. Meaning we were very low on the priority list and the electric company couldn't tell me when it would be fixed.

The uneasiness that comes with open-endedness, with accepting what is — especially when what is, is not what you want.

A few weeks before, Kevin went on a 4-day camping trip and I was terrified to be home alone at night — even with lights. As soon as the sun set, I'd move discretely from room to room, careful not to cross in front of the windows lest someone outside see me. "Someone…" who happened to be lurking outside my rural home at the end of a dead-end dirt road on an island with more geckos than people per household? I knew even at the time that the terror was more imagined than real. Yet no statistics or line of logic could overpower my overactive imagination.

During the power outage, Kevin left one evening for an event he had already committed to weeks before and again, I found myself home alone at night — this time in complete darkness. I did not tuck and roll from room to room. I did not panic breathe myself to sleep. I read by candlelight and listened to classical music on the AM/FM hand-crank radio. I had faced the darkness before. I had confronted my fear of being alone, and I was no longer afraid.

The darkness exposes weaknesses that are hard to see in the light. The stark contrast highlights the things you don't want to look at. The ones that are easily ignored or hidden or distracted from during daylight hours. When you're confronted with them in the void, they stand out, magnified like the carbide lamp on a miner's helmet or your voice reflected back over and over again in the echo of a deep well.

There's only ever been one boogie man waiting for you in the dark, and it's the hardest one to face.

When the lights are off and you're alone in the darkness, notice what rises up. The fears that transform into room-sized shadow puppets threatening to swallow you whole and the little voice inside you whimpering (or is it screaming?). When everything else is stripped away and there's nothing left to hide behind because you're already behind it — what's left?

My learning curve in Hawai'i has been steep from the beginning, but at this point, it's an endless chairlift up Mauna Kea and it's too blizzardy to see the top. I've taken quite a few on the chin this last round of years and this last storm has just about topped me off and teetered me over. I've done enough holding on, hanging in, and fighting back. It feels as if I've finally run out of runway.

I've tried everything else; now it's time to give in, buckle up, and allow the descent. It's time to become a student of mother nature, to learn her cycles and embrace her chaos. It's time to stop trying to control, stop thinking I know, and take notice:

Those two seconds of sunlight when the storm clouds let up and the rain pauses its pummeling.

Neighbors who look out for each other. Who make house calls to help get generators running, to make sure we all get through this together.

Enough water (even if it's cold) to bathe, to brush my teeth... heck, just having teeth to brush!

That glimmer of light from a candle or flashlight: just enough to ensure I don't step on the cat or run into the kitchen table.

It's the blackest and the most wonderful time of the year because it's in this silence of darkness that we're able to see the faintest light.

Credits

Pomegranates by Porya Hatami

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