even in darkness, we gather light

by bam

i know the darkness is inching toward us, minute by minute. and i welcome it, being a winter baby, and being drawn to shadows and inkiest night. but i find myself thinking glistening sorts of thoughts these past few days, make-believing we’re pulling up chairs on this snow-swaddled morn for a festive wintry all-chair tea. 

my house is aglow and will be glowier once the candles are plunked in the menorah, and kindled one by one, eight nights in a row. this year, for the first time in two decades and only the second time since 1959, both Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah fall on the twenty-fifth of december. i’ll be pulling out all the festival stops with my anglophile mother’s favorite yorkshire pudding and roast of beef, and my beloved’s brisket and latkes. (crank the ovens! and, please, bring on the sous chefs!)

but here, at my make-believe solstice tea, i imagine the tintinnabulation of porcelain teacups being stirred with antique silver spoons, and the pungent perfume of star anise and clove and the peel of one fat orange simmering in my old red “christmasy smell” pot. without make-believing, i inhale the foresty perfume of the fraser fir that, for days now, has stood proud in the corner, obnoxiously blinking because someone pulled the wrong box off the hardware store shelf.

if we were all here, gathered round this old worn table, we’d be shy maybe at first. surely, one or two wouldn’t be because there’s always a livelier wire in every good bunch. but i’m of the shyer persuasion these days, so i’d be purring most loudly simply being a listener. i’m apt to station myself on the circle’s outer edge, and to be the one keeping close and quiet watch. 

i’d delight myself in crowding the table with sugar-dusted spice cookies, crisp and bronze round the edges. and i’d put out a mound of satsuma oranges, the ones plucked with leaves still attached, drawing me that much closer to pretending i’m sitting on the orchard floor, spine leaned against the trunk, peeling a just-plucked orb, watching the clouds waft by. 

and here at the old maple slab, there would be teas by the pots full. and a crackling hearth just across the room, where logs would hiss and pop and flames would leap up the chimney. and warm woolen blankets would be amply piled in a basket nearby. and a drummer boy or two surely would pa-rum-pum-pum-pum from the crackly radio. and maybe i’d set out earthenware bowls, one filled with clementines, another with sprigs of clove, and spools of ribbons, for the making of pomanders while we while away the morn telling stories.

i’d send you home with candy canes. and a fat satsuma too. and to tuck in your pocket, these beautiful, beautiful poems for safe-keeping. the first, from rainer maria rilke, and the next two from wendell berry, the farmer poet from the bluegrass state where i was born. his first is solstice-focused, and the other, a magical reframing of the very first Christmas.

all this my way of saying merry blessed Christmas, and Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, too. may the glistenings and tinklings and all the spicy perfumes of the season set aglow your deep and tender and most blessed heart…

Advent
The wind in winter woods is like
a shepherd to his flock of flakes
and soon the firs anticipate
how blessed will be the light

and eavesdrop. The garden doves
ready themselves in branches white
and fend off the wind, growing towards
the glory of this night.
—Rainer Maria Rilke

To Know the Dark
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.
––Wendell Berry

Remembering that it happened once
Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.
––Wendell Berry

my hope this day of longest night, when darkness is the victor, is that no matter when or how the darknesses come we always find those and that which brings us light in all its intensities, from flickering to full-on blazing. bless you, bless you, ever bless you…

where do you find your essential light?

that fat little fir up above is the one that fills the room with its insistent eau de forêt. 

*branch of birds above from beautiful amy years ago….