looking into the darkness
maybe it’s the darkness we’re meant to look into. deep into. maybe halves of the world go darkest once a year, so we become practiced. so not only our eyes but our souls learn to widen the aperture, to let in whatever droplets of light there might be. or maybe it’s the inky darkness itself we’re meant to wrap ourselves in. to not be afraid.
maybe we’re left to our own devices when the darkness comes — and it will come — so we learn to find our way. steady our wobbling, put meat to the muscle that holds us upright. in a lifetime’s ebb and flow of darkness and light, it’s the shadowed chapters that have made me the deeper parts of who i am. maybe we should all look to the roots wriggling down below the frozen crust of earth to see how it’s done, how the growing comes unnoticed, in the tabernacle of earthly darkness.
maybe we’d be wise to consider the hidden work of wintertide, the profound intelligence unfolding where eyes cannot see, where sense cannot reach.
in this year’s darkest hour, i can’t say i was up keeping night vigil, awaiting the nadir of night. i was not out in my yard, kindling sticks and dried-up old leaves, setting a bonfire to keep the darkness at bay. fact is, i was felled by a bug that did have me up moseying about the house in the wee hours, but not to contemplate the darkness.
what i did do, as is my wont (and i did it by daylight), was gather up words, snippets of poetry, that made me think about light and darkness, and the shimmering shards we need to find to keep from tumbling headlong into the abyss.
the world this christmas is dark indeed. more than ever, we need to light our way. and pray that our penumbra illumines the path of those who travel nearby.
a solstice offering…
Let the ordinary be in your hand;
hold it open and imagine a bird landing,
offering all it possesses in trust
to come to you.
Learn to look for the little things
that weigh nothing at all,
but fill the heart with such light
they can never be measured.
-Kenneth Steven*, Seeing the Light
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
Holding the Light
by Stuart Kestenbaum
Gather up whatever is
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled
in the waves or fallen
in flames out of the sky,
for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken,
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together.
Make a place where
the day speaks to the night
and the earth speaks to the sky.
Whether we created God
or God created us
it all comes down to this:
In our imperfect world
we are meant to repair
and stitch together
what beauty there is, stitch it
with compassion and wire.
See how everything
we have made gathers
the light inside itself
and overflows? A blessing.
i keep watch on a few monastics who dwell in the heart of france. brother laurence, a modern-day mystic, sent along this the other day, a wonder of imagery from the winter’s solstice at Newgrange, a stone-age relic and world heritage site that rises from the earth not too, too far from the irish sea along ireland’s eastern shore. he sent a short video along with this short meditation:
“New Grange is a monumental 5,000 year-old burial mound in Count Meath, Ireland. At sunrise on December 21st, the first ray of direct sunlight from the new-born sun precisely, silently, enters the narrow aperture over the entrance, penetrates into the mound of solid rock and fills the inner chamber with golden light for seventeen minutes. Light overcomes darkness. It is irresistible and yet gentle. As it grows stronger with occasional surges, its intensity increases and the power of its beauty. It communicates purely by itself – the meaning of truth.
“I hope you can take time to watch this short silent video of the phenomenon. It captures a sacred moment, the revelation of God in nature. And it may give you a sense of how the light of Christ, the light of truth, actually enters and changes our world.” (Laurence Freeman, OSB)
and finally, for those among us who find the poetic to be a vessel of the ineffable sacred, this from a Paris Review interview with the late great Louise Gluck. i particularly swooned over the line that a poem “is like a message in a shell held to an ear”…:
From the beginning, Glück cited the influence of Blake, Keats, Yeats, and Eliot—poets whose work “craves a listener.” For her, a poem is like a message in a shell held to an ear, confidentially communicating some universal experience: adolescent struggles, marital love, widowhood, separation, the stasis of middle age, aging, and death. There is a porous barrier between the states of life and death and between body and soul. Her signature style, which includes demotic language and a hypnotic pace of utterance, has captured the attention of generations of poets, as it did mine as a nascent poet of twenty-two. In her oeuvre, the poem of language never eclipses the poem of emotion. Like the great poets she admired, she is absorbed by “time which breeds loss, desire, the world’s beauty.” –Henri Cole
*as this is the second Kenneth Steven poem in as many weeks, you can bet i am following his thread and will be finding out more about this scottish poet and children’s book writer. and gathering up his new book of poems, Seeing the Light, from my favorite friendly librarians….
where are you gathering up shards of light these days?
pull up a chair 