The Stones at Callanish

Scotland, Day 5:



My Peruvian teachers say that, at night, the plants come alive. They work all day transforming sunlight into life. After the sun goes down, they sing night songs and play with the stars and the dark air.

I think the same is true of stone circles. The stones have a completely different energy at night.  This is why, when I take a group to the standing stones of Callanish on the windswept, western  Isle of Lewis, I like our first visit to be at night.

We are typically the only people there, which is extraordinary. The stones have an openness and receptivity that they don’t have in the daylight. It’s typical for first time night visitors to burst into tears as they approach the stones. Something deep and ancient opens in them, something completely non rational, a portal that is inside us all the time, but is usually held tightly closed by the daylight-mind. The night stones sing open that doorway of the old heart, the heart that is organically connected to  everything alive (and which knows that everything is alive), the heart totally at home with Mystery, with no need to explain anything, to put things into categories, to judge worthiness - the primary activities of human beings during daylight.

It’s the easiest environment to make prayers to release your regret and fear, and to ask the Great Powers to put their energy and support under your vision for yourself and the world (which is exactly the prayers we made together). 

I ask the travelers to turn off their headlamps just before we round the corner of a hill, and the stones appear in our sight. I had planned our trip to visit the stones on the night of the full moon, and the mostly cloudy skies cooperated by delivering to us a properly coy and flirtatious moon just perfect for prayer-making. I thought of the Wendell Berry poem:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.