Here in the Pacific Northwest, it’s all about the trees, at least when it comes to natural beauty, outdoor recreation, and occasionally… natural disaster. In the summer, fires rage through our forests with increasing frequency, casting a dingy, orange veneer over the sky in August, and giving those of us who live on the edge of the woods a scare every now and again.

In the winter, the Ice Storm Cometh.

Okay, it’s a weak joke. But it’s ice, not snow, which closes down the roads in Oregon every few years and cuts power to hundreds of homes. Ice… on trees. This year, we thought we’d made it through the worst of it and had come out relatively unscathed, with only a few nights by candlelight to show for our troubles. Just one last bout of freezing rain, the forecaster promised, and then temperatures would rise. We went outside that evening and could hear the trees going down all around. That last twelve hours had pushed the ice-laden trees over the edge, sent branches crashing down onto roads, houses, cars and power lines, uprooting trees whose water-logged roots had frozen, then failed.

On Tuesday, the power went out again. Projected fix date? Sunday.

The first night, we broke out the candles and the games. My son, now twenty and home from college while he fixes up his van for an epic road trip, made a marvelous curry on the wood stove. The propane burners were still operable (although the well was not), but we thought it would be fun to rough it, and the food was delicious, more so for the exotic pleasure of cooking it the way it was done for centuries. This failure of modernity was somehow reassuring. Life went on, albeit at a slower pace. As I lit the candles, I felt a connection, aware that this was once the main technology for illumination after dark. After a while, our eyes adjusted as we played round after round of Dominion – which we’d rarely played since the kids were young. The table seemed downright bright, cast in the warm, flickering light.

We were all captured by the ambiance, the fun of connecting over laughter and games, a sense of magic. When our modern conveniences fail us, many of us discover a strange mixture of irritation and relief. Everything is harder to do, takes longer, and requires more effort, but time slows down, and we’re forced to set our “to do” list aside, to focus on the basics, and hopefully, to remember what matters. There’s a paradox here: our modern technologies make so much possible with the push of a button, the flip of a switch, and yet that same expediency bears a hidden cost. The underlying miracle is obscured by the ease of its manifestation. At least in my privileged corner of the world, we have become like gods. Let there be light, we say, and there was light! All things can be known with a well-crafted search term. I can order a blender from the other side of the world, and it will arrive by next Thursday. How strange it is, then, that when I’m lighting a candle in the middle of an ice storm it is then that I think to myself – isn’t that amazing? That tiny flame, and suddenly, I can see.

Don’t get me wrong – by the time the electric lights (and the water, mind you) came back on almost a week after the first outage, I was ready. But I was determined to retain something of my wonder, a remembrance that by unplugging from technology, I am able to connect to something else that resonates through the ages, connecting me to the past, but more importantly, to the present. We have decided to celebrate our own power-outage evenings in the future. We will turn off the electric lights and set flame to candle, break out the games, and then spend long hours listening to our son play the piano, flipping through old photo albums and talking about nothing-much. And when the world seems like it is barreling towards some cliff beyond my line of sight, I can always pull the plug, if just for a while, shut the lid of my computer on the faces of doom, and – lighting a candle – remember that in this moment, there’s nothing here but the miracle of that tiny glow. It’s a small act, but powerful, and maybe there’s a secret in that, an ordinary act that echoes down through the ages, through famine and war and fear and strife – even then, candles have been lit, again and again. Just like my candle. And if that small thing does not change, maybe other things remain as well, the things that matter, like love, and family, and the simple privilege of being alive.