Driving home, we play “I Spy” and I name something black.

The sky!

she says.

Nope! Something else.

I say, but I’m thinking “skies are blue” and I’m thinking “it is dusk, so it is more deep purple” and still the thought confuses me.

Black Skies

Of course, at night the sky is black. And our easy response to

What color is the sky?

is only sometimes true. This time of year, only half true.

Sometimes it isn’t blue or black. February in the Midwest means the sky is gray.

Dark Days

It feels dark now. It feels like something is wrong. Always wrong. We are wrong. It feels like the days are short and the night is long. It feels like the season, the annual return of the discontented winters.

And yet I stare out the window at the sun shining, bouncing off bumpers, people getting their morning coffee on their way to work, or they are at work.

All of this talk of darkness doesn’t match the outside world; it doesn’t match our lived experience. Not the now. Not the here.

It seems like we are supposed to be upset, supposed to be confused, supposed to feel like things are darker than they really are.

One of my favorite moments in filmmaking was the sublime visit to Canada in Bowling for Columbine. The moment in which Michael Moore is interviewing a woman at a bar about whether or not she locks her doors.

No, she tells him.

He asks if she’s ever been robbed.

Yes, a decade ago.

Did it make her afraid? Did it change her behavior?

No.

Confusion

Why do we think it is dark when the sun is out? Why do we feel hopelessly confused when the evidence is around us?

My cynical side thinks we like it that way.

A glass always half empty; always missing something. No abundance, blessing, thankfulness.

We are so willing to deceive ourselves, so willing to accept our experience of the truth that we can’t deal with another’s. So ready to take sides, feeling like we have no other choice.

Watching Parenthood with my wife, diagnosing the problem between Julia and Joel, the marital strife of the last two seasons, the separation, questions of infidelity, all coming from long-rooted anxieties and deals: commitments made and now changed, we fall into such easy traps of comparison.

As much as I am upset with the husband, he makes sense. He’s been through so much, such hard times and he had so little support. Not like Julia, with family. Not like Julia had with him at home. Her job, her struggles, her insecurities made sense to me, but her response drew no sympathy from me.

On the couch next to me each week, my wife tells the TV husband to stop being stupid. He screwed up.

We slide into our positions so easily, we don’t recognize them as positions. The husband is misunderstood. No, the wife is misunderstood. I am misunderstood. No, I am misunderstood.

Light

Around us is not our perceptions, but our world. It isn’t dark. It is less violent. It isn’t what we think it is.

Out there are just phantoms.

Of course some boogeymen exist, but they aren’t surrounding us. Our perception is not our reality. And worse, our perception is heavily skewed. It is incredibly wrong.

The twisting shadows aren’t the absence of light, but the response to the light. It isn’t dark, it is shaded. The light is still here. The light is at our beckoning.

We can choose to hold it in our hands.

We can illumine ourselves and reveal the world as it is.

We can listen to our children when we sing

Hide it under a bushel?

And they shout

NO!!!!!

They know the world. What’s at stake. What the right thing to do is. They aren’t confused by the dark. Not yet.

Listen. Hope. Know.