"Darkness Cannot Drive Out Darkness"

Contemplating contrasts on January 20, 2025

Today is Inauguration Day, and also Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s just an accident of the calendar: January 20 and the third Monday in January happen to be the same day this year. Still, I find myself thinking about juxtapositions. Contrasts. The way placing two things side by side has the power to illuminate. This minor coincidence almost feels like history nudging us to compare and contrast these two powerful American men, and reflect on their differing visions¹ of who we are, who we could be, and our collective future.

I was thinking about contrasts last night, too, when I walked out onto a frozen lake with my partner and our dog here in Umeå, Sweden. It’s not a secluded spot—this is a lake that lives in the city. I could hear the highway nearby, and if we’d walked out to the middle, we could have seen the glowing sign of a Burger King and a grocery store. But it was still dark enough there for the colors of the aurora borealis to really pop.

The green arms of light stretched all the way across the sky. At one point, they morphed into a shape that reminded me just a bit of the enormous reef manta ray I had the honor of swimming next to a few years ago, off the coast of Australia. Reef mantas can live for forty years or more.² I hope it’s still out there today, flapping peacefully through a different sort of darkness.

Mantas evolved millions of years before humans. They were already in perpetual motion through Earth’s oceans when our distant ancestors began walking north out of Africa. Some of those adventurous people didn’t stop until they bumped into the ice sheet covering the top of the world. Forty-thousand years ago, they made a life for themselves in Siberia. Surely, they stood out in the winter darkness and watched the aurora from time to time, just as we did last night. The northern lights are impossible not to wonder over, and about.

Now we know that the aurora is caused by bursts of energy from the Sun interacting with the planet’s magnetic field. Witnessing it as a special gift of being an Earthling—strong magnetic fields like ours are somewhat rare in the universe.³ Then again, there would be no Earthlings without the magnetic field, because life wouldn’t be possible without this mostly invisible thing, protecting us from deadly radiation and allowing us to have oceans and an atmosphere.

It’s always up there. But in order to see it, and really appreciate it, takes going to a very dark place.

1. Here are just a few of Dr. King’s brave and brilliant words. This quote feels especially helpful right now: "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

2. Check out the Manta Trust for tons of information about these amazing beings.

3. Thanks to Elizabeth Fernandez for this piece in Big Think.