The Things That Grow Only in the Dark

We have a complicated relationship with darkness. From the earliest age we are taught to prefer the light, to seek the lit room, to understand the dark as the place where the dangerous things live and the light as the place where safety and clarity and the ability to see clearly are available. The nightlight exists because darkness is understood as the condition of threat rather than the condition of growth, as the thing to be eliminated as quickly as possible rather than the thing to be inhabited with any quality of trust or patience or genuine expectation that what the darkness contains might be valuable in ways that the light cannot produce.