The trees begin to undress. The days shorten. As we rise and set in darkness, a distant yet familiar impulse echoes at the back of our mind, calling us to prepare for hibernation. Last month’s Fall Equinox brought balance between day and night, bridging the hours of darkness and light into subtle equilibrium. Although we have been culturally conditioned to fear darkness, the change of season presents a rite of passage into a new cycle, a new beginning. We leave behind the vibrancy of Summer as Fall welcomes us with a cool yet grounding embrace, encouraging us to turn inward, rekindle our relationship to darkness and immerse ourselves in its particular beauty.

Shadow and darkness have indeed long held negative associations. Derogatory connotations stemming from religion, culture and story have resulted in centuries-long ostracisation and villainisation of darkness. Children are taught to be afraid of the dark through chilling bedtime stories of supernatural beasts. Antagonists in literature and entertainment are portrayed in black, as dark and evil. Hell becomes analogous to darkness while Heaven is light and good. Our shadow self represents all that is hidden and toilsome. Even in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, we find shadow portrayed as a metaphor for everything we should avoid. It seems apparent that in this eternal duel, shadow has inevitably drawn the short straw.

The polarisation of light vs dark or good vs evil exists unconsciously in our brain, tucked away in the depth of our subconscious, obscured in symbolic form. Culturally reenforced for centuries, this duality traces all the way back to our ancestors. Birthed from hunter-gathers in the Northern Hemisphere, it reflects primitive man’s fear of darkness and the unknown. In the wilderness, after the sun had set, our ancestors became vulnerable prey to animals lurking in the night. This scenario played over thousands of years, engraining these belief systems and permanently altering our perception of shadow. On the other hand, hunter-gatherers lived at the mercy of their environment and were consequently aligned with its cycles, both the change of seasons and the daily transitions of day into night. Harmonising with the sun’s rise and fall movements nourished a relationship to nature that was sacred and pure, something we lost as a result of our ongoing quest for light. Our relentless pursue of brighter environments along with the technologies facilitating that purpose have almost eradicated shadow from our lives, estranging ourselves from its hidden mythologies.

We turn to the East to Japan who, on the other hand, has long understood the wisdom of shadow, successfully nurturing their appreciation of it through decades of humble living and subtle lighting structures. They found beauty in this dualistic dance, as is gracefully portrayed by Junichiro Tanizaki in his 1933 essay ‘In Praise of Shadows’, a poetic dive into Japanese arts, tea ceremony and Wabi-sabi. Born from the tradition of tea ceremony or ‘Way of Tea’ (Wabi Cha), Wabi-sabi was birthed by Sen Norikyu in the 16th century and continues to bewilder our Western society with its simple and delicate nuances. Wabi-sabi celebrates the absence of light, finding beauty in shadow, stillness and imperfection, prioritising natural materials in their unfinished and unpolished form.