And in the dark of night…

I’ve gotten into the habit of looking out the front door before I go to bed, whether here at home or on the island. I could pass such an oddity off as functional – checking the weather or something –but we’re all half-odd after months of COVID and denying such seems waste of breath. So yeah, every night, a quick look out the door, to see what kind of a sky is out there.

Rarely am I disappointed. On the island, I’m rewarded by a vivid night sky or the flashing beacon of the Loop Head lighthouse, or waves crashing by the shore.

Last night, up a hill in Roscommon, as far from waves as is nearly possible in this country, I stepped out to look up. And not for the first time, in this quiet corner of what passes for an unexceptional place, I paraphrased Louis Armstrong and thought to myself, what a wonderful world.

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In Roscommon and on the Aran Islands, there is little light pollution to sully the glory of a night sky. Last night above me, the sky was the deepest of navy – saved from blackness by a moon not yet full. There were clouds but they were thin, like pulled cotton wool, and proved no match for a beaming moon like a lightbulb suspended in the sky.  

Often, the stars are daubed across the sky like spilt glitter, but last night each seemed discernible in its own space as if rebelling against infinity. They were not merely yellow, as we might expect of stars, but orange and silver and some white. Some gently flickering, others fiercely burning. I saw a shooting star. It was my own involuntary gasp that made me aware of it.   

The sky at night in west Roscommon and on the Aran Islands is uncorrupted, it is clean. Under it, the landscape is minimalist, stripped of the colour and detail that adorn it in the day. While the world is in slumber, the landscape is but silhouettes and ideas. The sparkle of faraway street lights is the only reminder of a hectic and chaotic world. It is the purest, clearest picture the mind will see.

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Here, up this hill, the wonders of a night sky are complimented by almost total silence and darkness. Standing last night on crunched grass in worn pink slippers, a blanket around me, I strained to hear sound, and heard nothing until a car approached the nearest town. Silence was not restored until the car was miles away. On nights like this, sound travels far; a single car might sound like motorway traffic, a freight train’s gentle rumble can rip open the night. But beyond the mechanical is nought but silence, broken occasionally by shrieking foxes and distant barking dogs.

It is the opposite on the island; rarely is there absolute quiet, for the sea is never silent. That is magic too.

How dark is this night in this place? Other than the moon, a bathroom light and and faraway streetlights, darkness reigns supreme. From this front door, I see the villages of Granlahan, Williamstown and Ballymoe – clusters of yellow streetlights, divided by chasms of darkness. From the front door on the island, similarly, in lines like battalions, stand the villages of the Connemara coast, their streetlamps glistening off the water; An Cheathrú Rua, Inverrin, Furbo, An Spiddal and Bearna. All else is black. Dark.

The city dweller might think this absoluteness of silence and darkness intimidating or boring, but I am transfixed. Without the distraction of details, my mind opens to the infinite possibilities the cosmos inspire.  

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I am no stranger to the dark and night skies. My earliest memory is of a cold, hard night like last night, where as a small child I am being carried from door to gate and back, over and over and over, in the hope of cold air relieving my croop cough (a cough as painful to hear as it is to execute). That that is my first memory might explain the later fascination.  

Donning a high-vis vest and walking home in the dark is a joy for me. Moon or no moon, I use no light, but trust my feet, feeling with my toes for the grassy centre of the road and following that until my eyes adjust. Never do I feel more at one with this place than then, when instinct leads. On such nights, it is but five minutes from one house to the other, and the time for wonder is fleeting. But in Chicago, where the stars were scarcely visible even by the expanse of the lake, it was those five minutes I missed more than any other.

Imagination can run gloriously wild at night. I think of how in this darkness, the landscape must look broadly the same as it did for those before me who walked these paths, they too without lamp or torch. When lights are off and cars parked up, when “trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure”[1], the landscape can be imagined as anything.

Maybe I’m actually on to something; that in the rural dark nothing is pretended, switched on, disrupted or dickied-up for the day ahead, that the world is at its realest at night. Maybe it’s more metaphorical, and the moon represents a beacon of light in darkness, that the night sky is like a protective shroud, that the night wipes the board clean ready for a new start and new day. Often, concerns I might have during the day – the absurd and the serious – dissolve in the cold night’s air as I gaze upon the stars and wonder at the moon.   

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How Wordsworth felt when gazing upon the daffodils is how I feel in those moments at night. Few have the time or inclination to don blanket and slippers and go out into the night. But in a world where we struggle to relax, where we pay a fortune to meditate, even if toes never leave doorstep, perhaps ‘just outside’ is as good a place as any to get our reflective fix.  

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[1] John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom