Dec '09

Imagine the days are getting shorter. It isn’t hard this time of year because the days are getting shorter. Now imagine clustering in small tribal groups under a sky darkened by the new moon. Everyone you know and care about is nearby. Someone walks close to the fire and looks toward the crescent moon and begins telling about another night not long ago. It was a night like this one. He and some other men had been hunting and decided to make camp when out of nowhere a light rose on the horizon and hovered nearby. When one of the men tried to approach, it went away.

Now, it’s the twentieth century in a college town bar filled with boys and girls telling stories. One of the boys stands up and begins telling about going to a spot outside Sedalia, Missouri to see the ghost lights. He tells of sitting in his car with other teenagers waiting when a strange blue light appears. Everyone is frightened (after all why else would a car load of teens drive a couple of hundred miles except to be scared out of their skins?) but one boy decides he knows what it is and he’s going to prove his theory. Only, when he tries to approach the light, it disappears; urban legend or atmospheric phenomena? 

I can even remember my car breaking down late one dark night on a country road outside Mazie, Oklahoma. It was during the holidays, near this time of year and several aunts, uncles, and cousins had gathered at my uncle Billy’s house outside of town (such as it is. Mazie has about 40 in town residents.) Three of us decided to go back to Pryor, about 14  miles north of Mazie.

It was late at night, no moon, no lights in the houses, and we didn’t know why the car quit running when a light suddenly appeared on the road behind us. Then as suddenly as it appeared it went disappeared. 

We were terrified. At any moment an escapee from the asylum with a hook for a hand would grab the door handle, no mention that the nearest mental hospital was miles away, an escaped inmate probably wouldn’t have a hook for a hand nor a flashlight nor would be wandering on this country road on such a cold night. 

We never knew what that light was until years later. Finally, I learned that the light was my uncle Billy’s mother, checking a car stopped on the road near her house. She had only used the light for a few minutes to look at the car — she didn’t need a light otherwise, since she had lived in that house for 70 years. 

How anti-climatic. Deranged inmates with steel hooks for hands are so much more interesting.

Today, I can Google and find out about such things as ghost lights. I can learn that they are found all over the world. Somehow the fun and mystery is lost in the knowing. Joseph Campbell, noted mythologist, noted that when a story is explained away something is lost. Reducing a story to its essential factors may explain elements within it, but it is a prime factor in the sense of loss many of us feel in our culture. That is not to say that knowing how to read a story takes away mystery. Knowing how to read can help us better access those mysterious places in our hearts, in our psyches; our shadow. The story asks us to become comfortable with mystery; with our intuition; with the wisdom of our hearts. 

This is the season of story. Our souls are fed when we listen to one another’s story and tell our own. One may find the nativity story one of hope in a dark time; yet another may find the pagan stories surrounding the solstice inspiring and hopeful. Take time to sit with friends. Listen to their stories and tell your own. Your soul will thank  you in ways you might never imagine. But that’s something completely different.