I drew this sketch of a dream ten years ago, 25 November 2014.
Last night’s dream, 2 October 2024: I’m on a farm, in a yard near the farmhouse, when a woman in a car comes racing down the lane, around a sharp curve between stone walls, spewing gravel in the wake of her tires. She spins the car around and backs it up beside a big barn and the rear end of the car gets caught on the low stone wall. She leaves the car running, tires spinning, gets out of the car, and starts to walk across the yard toward the farmhouse. Her sunglasses are askew, and she looks confused. I walk toward her. To comfort her? To help her regulate? To tell her to turn off her car, or scold her? The alarm goes off and it is morning.
Who is this woman? Is she a version of me? Is she the women of America? Is she the goddess herself? She didn’t seem particularly angry or anxious. Just impatient and confused. I think I need to find this out during the coming season.
In this season of ripening into darkness, as worries whirl around me like angry wasps, I asked the Mother, By what name shall I call you? And I saw a the parade of Deerpeople who wandered through the farm on balmy summer mornings, the shaman ancestor with her drum, the dream I had of a woman who was a deer who was a tree who was a shelter to small animals and birds in her branches and among her roots.
Oh Antlered One: who calls me home to live within the garden of myself: Help me to find the still point in this maelstrom of my anxious fears, to follow where the sacred tug of griefs and rages will guide me to the wisdom I will write upon the pages of these my croning years.
As often happens in the wake of a Poem-a-day spree on the blog, when the month (November or April) is over, I neglect the blog. This time, I did begin writing a piece in early December on spiritual gaslighting, but I couldn’t find my way the whole way through it, so I’ve been letting that sit here, waiting for me to come back and give it some energy and focus.
In the meantime, it’s Yuletide, Solstice season, Christmastide, the High Holy Days of the year, and I want to offer some seasonal greetings here at the Turning, the Pause, the Quiet and the Hush, the Between.
I know two things about the Dark Season of the Wheel of the Year: One is that I am physiologically inclined to depression and anxiety when I am not getting enough sunlight. The other is that I love the darkness, the shadows, the dreamtime and storytime, the flickering candles in the dusk, the fogs and mists of winter. So I live in the paradox of that, tending to my mental and physical health the best I can while reveling in the spiritual richness to be found in wandering through the shadows.
As my wise mother says, it can be both/and. I can be tending to my winter sadness AND reveling in the darkness at the same time.
In this season of lights and shadows, may you revel and celebrate joy, and sit quietly in the darkness with your shadows, honor the pain and the memories, and dance with delight at the new thing coming, follow the stories of of anguish and horror, and hold the stories of bravery and kindness, feast merrily with your beloveds, and offer food to those who do not have enough, give in to your weariness, and take your rest, and stay up all night with the revelers. Take from the season what you need. Let it offer you darkness and light, sorrow and joy, glad tidings and the space to mourn. May your heart be broken open as you re-member yourself to the shadows, as you re-call yourself to the light.
Keep track of your dreams in these days between Solstice and Christmas, between Christmas and New Year, New Year and Epiphany. Notice the persistent images and words that float around you in the day. What messages are you hearing? What words are asking for your attention? What birds and animals keep slipping through the edges of your awareness? Sometime around the New Year, or Epiphany, settle on one word or image or idea. Let that be your guide for the coming season, or the coming year. Between now and the beginning of February, when we celebrate our awareness of the growing light, the quickening of the Earthwomb–this six weeks is a time to consider what we need to bring into the light, and what we need to allow to gestate for a longer time in our own inner darkness.
Now is the time to claim your darkness. It might make me uncomfortable. It may make me afraid. But it’s my own shadow, my own personal cave. This is the time to gently probe the corners with our hands and toes, into the places where the light does not reach. In those places that make us afraid because we do not know them, there may also be treasures hidden. Blessings on your searching. Blessings on your darkness.
Gratitude List: 1. Time with Beloveds 2. The hush, the pause, the quiet, and the riotous revels 3. The spaces for both joy and sadness 4. Morning fog, and birds singing through the fog 5. The merry lights of my Advent candles in their birch candle holders May we walk in Beauty!
Joyful Kwanzaa to my friends who are celebrating the first fruits: Today is Umoja, or Unity, time to reflect on ways in which we can bring unity in divided situations in the coming year.
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” —Mary Oliver
“Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.” ―Susan Sontag
“People who own the world outright for profit will have to be stopped; by influence, by power, by us.” —Wendell Berry
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” —Mary Oliver
“When you understand interconnectedness, it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying.” —Robert A. F. Thurman
“It’s quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people’s dreams.” ―Gayle Forman
“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“There is still a window of time. Nature can win If we give her a chance.” —Dr. Jane Goodall
“By virtue of the Creation and, still more, of the Incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see. On the contrary, everything is sacred.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“I am as conscious as anyone of the gravity of the present situation for [hu]mankind. . . . And yet some instinct, developed in contact with life’s long past, tells me that salvation for us lies in the direction of the very danger the so terrifies us. . . . We are like travelers caught up in a current, trying to make our way back: an impossible and a fatal course. Salvation for us lies ahead, beyond the rapids. We must not turn back—we need a strong hand on the tiller, and a good compass.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“Many years from now, when the world I know now is only an echo, my love will still be alive, still be touching hearts and changing minds, still be bringing people a sense of peace and hope. The love we send out does not disappear. It is carried forward by those who receive it, adding their love to ours, sending it forward, a promise made and remade for generations. Rejoice: your love lives forever.” —Steven Charleston
This afternoon, I crawled through cobwebs in the attic to retrieve two full snakeskins and several partial snakeskins that someone had shed at the same place in the eaves. I tried to talk to the AI about a woman with snakes for necklaces, but I wasn’t happy with any of those, so I altered a picture of myself.
I led Sunday School today with a Poetry for Advent theme: Feeling our Way Into the Darkness. One of the various prompts I offered for writing was to write a poem in a labyrinth. I printed out copies of Lisa Gidlow Moriarty’s Dancing Woman Labyrinth. This afternoon, I pulled phrases from my labyrinth poem to make this.
Darkness calls. My shadow blends into shifting Shadow, and I am borne upon wave upon wave of indigo shade. I am uncertain but unafraid stepping into the fresh adventure of unknowing.
Gratitude List: 1. Crows 2. Treasure trove of snake skins I found in the attic 3. Pileated Woodpecker in the treetops 4. The songs and conversation about Mary in church today. In the stories we tell, so often she has no agency, but we get to choose how we tell the story, who we make of her. For someone who daily prays the rosary, this was a particularly meaningful morning. 5. Poetry, and how it opens us to ideas, to each other, to Words. May we walk ever in Beauty!
“People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand—what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for—Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“The country is in deep trouble. We’ve forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that’s the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.” —Cornel West (2005)
“Do one thing every day that scares you.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” —Jane Austen
Last night’s sleep was deep and dreams were fleeting.
Gratitudes: 1. Deep sleep 2. Yesterday I saw a bald eagle, right here at the house 3. Baking 4. I’ll see my parents today, if fleetingly 5. All of you, candles and stars, lights twinkling in your own particular constellations, bringing the light.
May we walk in Beauty!
Christmas Eve Ponderings: “Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.” —Omar Khayyám
“In our heart and soul we are each like Mary, holding the possibility for a birth that can change the world.” —Llewellyn Vaughan Lee, Quote from A Prayer at the Winter Solstice (2012)
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. but let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune but do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy. —Max Ehrmann 1927
The times are feeling fearful to me. After listening to a discussion on the radio on the way home, in which People Who Seem to Know Things suggested that there’s a possibility of uprisings and violence after this election, I offer a slight paraphrase of the Rune of St. Patrick:
At Pisgah in this fateful hour, I place Earth and Heaven with their power, And the sun with its brightness, And the snow with its whiteness, And the fire with all the strength it hath, And the lightning with its rapid wrath, And the winds with their swiftness along their path, And the sea with its deepness, And the rocks with their steepness, And the earth with its starkness: All these I place, By divine help and grace Between myself and the powers of destruction!
Gratitude: For the golden leaves of autumn and the golden eyes of the cats. For darkness, of rest, of birth, of preparation for the new thing coming. For the inquisitive and curious minds of teenagers. For the web of beloved hearts that yearn and work for justice and peace, for true equality and for functioning and healthy communities. For you, beloveds. For you. For you.
May we walk humbly, loving mercy, doing justice, ever in Beauty.
We arrive at the shortest day. Silence. Stillness. This moment, when I am writing, is the darkness just before the dawn. The year, too, is dawning. Sit in the dark. Feel the empty quiet around you. Breathe in. Breathe out. Holy, holy, holy.
Gratitude List: 1. Laughing with my family. Somebody said last night that they were glad we get to celebrate Winter Stoltzfus together. 2. The long night is over and the day is dawning. 3. There are still many days to become acquainted with the shadows, but the light is returning. 4. How the house lights make the dew sparkle and twinkle. Light and shadow. Light and shadow 5. Now the day begins, the laughter, the clatter, the murmurs, the music the twinkling eyes.
If this journey into the December darkness is a labyrinth, today we have come to the second to last turning, the final passage before we turn inward to the center circle. Today is the approach, the last moment in the labyrinth walk, when I am usually asking myself, “Have I missed anything that I need to lay down, to let go of, to relinquish?”
Inanna gave up–willingly–all her symbols of personal power in her underground search for her sister, until at last she came to the deep central chamber naked and unadorned. No pretense, no mask, no tool, could hide or protect her when she entered the chamber to greet her sister, who was all moving shadow, all hidden secret.
What are the last unexamined scraps of our deep selves that we have left unexamined? What personal power have we yet failed to turn over to the guards at the gates?
Yesterday while I was folding clothes, I listened to LeVar Burton read the short story “Navigators,” by Mike Meginnis, about a boy and his father who play a video game whose heroine, instead of gathering powers as the game progresses, slowly gives up her powers. Each item they find in their hero’s journey disables something of the video character’s power. As she lost strength and speed, they began to notice other hidden aspects of the game, places they could hide, and ways their hero could escape rather than fight. It struck me how much this is like the Inanna tale.
So much there is that I want to fight for. I don’t want to enter this next doorway defenseless. If I am going to keep participating in this battle for justice for the children, for those who seek asylum and justice, for the planet herself, don’t I need to keep my fighting powers intact? Don’t I need to gain strength and power instead of letting it all fall away?
And there, I think, I am beginning to come toward the kernel that I might be trying to learn in this year’s labyrinth. In November, I experienced a significant hit to my ego, a sideways blow that made me question myself and my sense of belonging. Trying to respond with vulnerability and yet maintain my sense of safety took a great deal of inner energy. I raged a little bit that fate would keep bringing me this particular lesson–Didn’t I do the chapter on ego back in 2003? Haven’t I been through all the review sessions? Haven’t I already passed all the levels of this test?
There’s always one more test. You’re never really done. I stand here and hold my fragile ego in my hands, my own words from past lessons and tests ringing in my ears: Begin the lesson again. Lay it down. Break it open. One. Final. Thing.
Gratitude List: 1. Punctuation. I put a couple little punctuation jokes on the the board yesterday. Most of my classes smiled politely, but one class suddenly broke into an intense discussion of how we use punctuation in texting and social media these days, how it’s changing, how punctuation has suddenly become necessary to help create the emotional context for digital communication. It took twenty minutes of the class period, but it was such delightful intellectual analysis that I was happy to set aside the plan. 2. Those bright and shiny student brains and hearts. In three classes, we concluded Julius Caesar yesterday. At the end, I asked them to consider their own ideals for their countries. What is the purpose of a government? What should be the relationship of government to people? In two of the classes, more than five countries were represented, and in all of them were students from both sides of the US political spectrum, but in all three classes, the ideals brought forth were the same. 3. Examining the last shreds of ego to relinquish to December darkness. Today is the last leg of the inward journey. Tomorrow is the dark and quiet inner chamber. And then we begin walking toward the light. 4. Breaks from the routine. 5. Pops of color in the grey.
Such a strange and wakeful night it was. The borders between sleep and unsleep were oddly porous. Toward the end there, I did fall into deeper grooves of dream and sleep. I don’t feel particularly unrested, so there’s that. Perhaps it’s the load of work still to get done this week, or the doings in the House today, or the season, or the excitement of going to play practice again after twenty-five years. Or maybe it was simply cats and digestion.
This season, I have been reading Gayle Boss’ All Creation Waits again, learning about the various states of torpor and hibernation and quiet of various animals throughout a northern winter. I, too, feel torpor taking me, but it’s not always about deep sleep for me. Sometimes, it feels more like a simple need to rest quietly and profoundly, while the stories play out in my brain.
Winter is, for me, the Dreaming Time. I do head more readily toward sleep, if I don’t always actually make it to the deepest waters. After Solstice and Christmas, in the hush of nights when the planet seems to pause in its dance, as she begins the whirl back to exquisite balance, I listen more closely to my dreams, watching for symbols and images and words that I might mine for use in the coming year. Already, my night-brain seems to be readying me for the work of conscious dreaming.
Now comes the work of remembering and sorting the images that come in those half wakeful moments between the dreaming and sleeping and waking. May your dreams bring you wisdom.
Gratitude List: 1. The startling talents of my students. 2. The wisdom of dreams and darkness 3. Break is coming 4. Only 3 days until Sunreturn 5. Little spaces in the coming day in which to breathe
Today, we turn in to the third passage of this labyrinth. One thing I have noticed as I take this journey every year is that I get breathless. I find myself needing to take big sighs that don’t seem to quite satisfactorily fill my lungs. I’ll be walking in the halls at school and realize that I have been breathing shallowly, skimming the surface of breath.
So I sit or stand still, lift my chin, set my shoulders back, and take a long slow inward breath that goes down to my toes. When I breathe out again, I release some of that breath downward, through the base of my spine, into the Earth. You and I both know that the lungs are the organ of breathing in the body. I know that when we talk about breathing into our guts, we’re activating the diaphragm to get more involved in the activity of breathing. Still, for me, deep healing breath seems to follow more completely when I expand the activity of breathing throughout my body and into the Earth below me rather than simply centering it in my lungs. In the end I come away more grounded.
Try this, today in a moment between moments. Notice your breathing. Are you breathing deeply or shallowly? Settle yourself into a quiet space, either sitting or standing, and straighten your spine just a little. I think we’re trained to do the sudden, ramrod upward stance to quickly correct “bad posture.” This is about subtle movements that allow for a clear passage of air into our lungs. My shoulders go up and back a little, and I feel my spine as the road that connects Earth and Sky within me.
Breathe in. If you count when you breathe, you might try that. For me, I want to avoid regimentation in my breathing, and counting feels like that to me, but to some people, it’s a comfort. As you breathe in, notice your gut expanding, and feel your body open. Breathing out, send at least some of that breath down to your feet and to the base of your spine. This breath is roots that anchor you and hold you, connecting you to Earth.
Sometimes I get my arms involved, moving up and down with the breath, or I’ll shift my torso back and forth like a snake, to bring the breath into the nooks and crannies between my ribs. Roll your shoulders gently, or your neck, if that helps. Or make an audible sound on the outbreath. For me, the key is to do whatever helps me feel the breath filling all of me.
Right now, walking in this velvety morning darkness, I feel the quiet darkness of winter in the breath, and I take in the shadows that surround me. I am not afraid of this darkness. It’s the darkness of a deeply restful night, the darkness of a beloveds arms enclosing me, a regenerating darkness. The darkness in the chambers where the seed rests before it feels the stirrings that cause it to transform.
I cannot deny that I’m still anxious and claustrophobic about the long nights; that’s a feeling I need to keep naming and exploring, but at the same time I can still welcome the quiet restful dark. Walt Whitman said: “Do I contradict myself? Well, then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
One more thing about breathing: I have noticed that when I am talking with a student who is anxious or upset, if I subtly and consciously shift my breathing to a deeper level, they unconsciously join me in the deeper breath. I can see a shift, almost imperceptible, in their eyes, a relaxing. Try it when you’re in the presence of someone who is breathing shallowly because of anxiety or anger or weariness. We draw each other deeper as we tend to our own breath.
And so we walk onward, breathing together in the darkness. Breathing in the the darkness. I hear your steady breath, and the breathing of those who accompany us on this journey, and I know that when my breath falters, yours will be there to remind me to deepen.
Envisioning: (On Sunday, Michelle asked us to hold the swords-into-ploughshares vision in our heads, to look for stories of people choosing that vision. For the next little while, I am going to look for such stories as my daily morning meditation.)
The story I think about today is Starhawk’s novel, The Fifth Sacred Thing. In the story, the army of the Stewards is moving up the coast toward a free city/region. The people of the city have founded their civic life on principles based on nonviolence. As they decide how to respond to the coming army, they consider the point that armed resistance has been the chosen path of humanity for millennia, and it hasn’t worked. If they refuse to fight the invaders, they will lose their free way of life. If they find ways to arm themselves and fight, many of their number will die. If they choose a path of nonviolent resistance, many of them are also likely to die, but they might have a chance of preserving their way of life, and they won’t be compromising the principles upon which they’ve based their whole community. They tell the invading soldiers, “There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us.”
I would spoil the ending for you to tell you more, whether they miraculously “won” the day with their brilliant tactics of nonviolent resistance, or whether they were overtaken by the violent forces in the end. But that’s actually part of the point, isn’t it? We don’t know whether the vision will “work” in any physical/human sense, but we do it anyway because we hold a vision for the possibility for a different way for humans to be human with each other.
On this Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, the poetry prompt is to write about darkness.
Ritual for Inhabiting the Darkness
I. Stand in the doorway. Let the light stream in over your shoulders. See your shadow. Breathe into the stillness that awaits you..
II. Leave the the lighted rooms behind you. Walk forward onto the trail which your own shadow has laid out before you, until you have left the light so far behind you that it is only a memory of light.
III. Listen to the breathing of the darkness. Become a seed in the waiting soil of the dark. Feel how the darkness holds the pulsing life within you.
IV. Wait.
V. Crack open. Expand into the darkness. Send your roots down. Send your twining tendrils upward. Grow.
Mockingbird Chronicles 