We find the healing that we need anywhere we can, I suppose, but there is a good argument for the old homoeopathic idea that “like cures like” – and over these past weeks, when we seem to have fallen into so much darkness, I have found myself staying up into the small hours, making the most of the nights.
Like cures like. If a child is afraid of the dark, see if he won’t come out to watch a pair of little owls working a hedgerow at twilight, calling back and forth in that eerie way of theirs; or maybe persuade him to stand a while, observing a solitary bat as it swoops wide circles around a street lamp, or over a field of long grass, trailing elegant patterns in the air that seem almost visible as it passes. He may not want to come but, if he does, like cures like – and when we start to see beauty, or order, in what we previously feared, a change for the better has already begun.
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