When the lights go out

Third Sunday of Advent | This week along the way

Our electricity has been out here in our little canyon for over a day. The freezer is slowly thawing and the hot water in our tank has cooled to below comfortable shower levels.

A big storm swept through the California coast. San Francisco had their first-ever tornado warning. And a tornado even touched down here in Santa Cruz at a Safeway parking lot, overturning a bunch of cars and a fire truck.

There’s something exciting - magical, even - about the power going out. You get the candles out. You read books. You make due as best you can.

I was extraordinarily bummed that our fancy dancy BBQ grill can’t be used when the power is out I know. The ignition is electric. I got a deal on it at Home Depot. I mean, it IS fancy dancy. It’s a “smart grill” with all the bells and whistles. (It even has an app! And the temperature can be adjusted via Bluetooth!) I assumed there’d be a manual ignition option. But nope. Right now, it’s useless. And here, we see a malady of our greater technical culture.

So, yes… If you’ve been through an extended outage or two, you know that, as magical as having no electricity is, it’s also challenging. A couple/few hundred years ago, we had this whole no-electricity thing figured out. Not out of ingenuity but ignorance. But now, life runs on it.

I’m afraid that this is what’s already happening with the internet. Back in the early nineteen-hundred-and-nineties, when I was out being my best self rocking my Dawson’s Creek hair with my Discman securely clipped to the pocket of my Guess overalls, I had no idea what this internet thing even was. But now, life takes the internet for granted.

An example I’ll pluck out of thin air is newer cars… A lot of them don’t have a CD player. A lot of them don’t have a radio. They take for granted the car's owner has a cell phone with internet access. So when I’m driving to pick up my daughter at school, and CarPlay stops working, and the commute devolves into me troubleshooting while driving on Hwy 1, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other one thumbing through my phone to get the stupid music to play… Yes… I get a little bent. Okay, fine, it’s more like I see red. It’s so frustrating! This technology is supposed to make my life easier!

I digress…

Last night, I noticed I started to feel a bit claustrophobic. Or disoriented, at least. I couldn’t take a step without a light. It’s like I was bumping into the darkness all night. Trying to cook dinner (thank God we have a gas stove) in the dark with no hot water was a humbling experience.

But then we settled in and watched a movie on my iPad (alas, while I could, I downloaded The Santa Clause - a classic!). And by 9:30, I started to feel tired. Not like warn-out tired. (Well, maybe a little.) But full-body relaxed tired. I think it’s because it’d been dark since 5:30, so my brain had plenty of time to wind down without the stimulation of light.

After Rory crashed, I read for a bit (thankful for my trusty battery-powered reading light!). The darkness, which had tightened in on me like a straitjacket as I prepared mac and cheese, was now like - as the Danish say - a duvet of darkness surrounding me with comfort. Before long, I couldn’t keep my eyes open and followed Rory into a restful sleep. I was OUT. Like turning off the lights.

So yes, it’s the next morning, and we still have no electricity. But Advent happens in the dark. We’re getting a taste of it here in the Monterey Bay area.

To the control-centric human brain, darkness is disorienting. It’s even a little terrifying. But within the darkness, it’s true - we really see the light all the more. Though I spent yesterday and last night frustrated that we didn’t have our modern comforts and gadgets and technologies, I spent some amazing quality time with my daughter doing the most boring and simplistic stuff. The full moon was amazing. The mac n’ cheese was scrumptious. And sleep was some of the best I’d had in a very long time. I look forward to the Advent of the restoration of our fragile electrical grid. But I’ve also noticed that while it’s been out, a light shines within it without ceasing.

Last Week’s Homily…

In comfort and joy,
Jonas+