musings

On Wednesday I had the privilege of watching the almost-solstice sunset from the air.  This was my profile in the shadow of that sunset.

This is the holiest day of the year for me.  For the last week or two I’ve felt it coming, felt the awareness of the fulcrum we’re perched on more keenly than I can articulate.

One morning this past week, up early, I saw the year’s last full moon hanging low in the sky, heavy, striated with faint yellow, looking so close and so far away at the same time.  I watched the swollen moon as it passed towards the horizon, from the world we can see to that we can’t, and felt a tightness in my chest that reminded me: yes, this is solstice season.

Just this week, talking about the solstice, I told Grace and Whit about an experience I had many years ago on December 21.  It was dusk, and I was watching the sun go down.  I observed as the light at the horizon narrowed from a wide, almost spiky band of luminous pink to a narrower line, burning a fierce orange color.  All of a sudden, I was overcome with a sensation I hadn’t felt before and haven’t since.  I could sense my grandmothers, Susie, and Mr. Valhouli standing just over the edge of the horizon.  I couldn’t see them, of course, but I was aware of them, hands over their heads, waiting to receive the sun as it slipped from the bowl of our sky into that of theirs.

There’s something pagan and primitive about this day, a bone-deep awareness that the world turns in an enormous galaxy.  More than any other time of year, I’m reminded of our tiny place in the grand pageant of this universe.  Something ancient and essential beats in my body like a heartbeat on the solstice, an ancient message about the inextricability of and interplay between light and dark.

It is so dark right now, but there is also so much light.  This day reminds me of that.

The truth?  It has been a difficult month.  For a few weeks now I’ve been having that world-is-slightly-off-its-axis feeling more days than not.  A soul-level unease that manifests in clumsiness, over-reactivity, and exhaustion.  Do you know this feeling?  I’ve been dropping eggs and feeling more impatient than usual in various parts of my life, taking things personally (despite my own constant reminders to others and myself that I realize things are almost never about me) and forgetting things, sleeping hard and soundly but never feeling quite rested.

I’ve also been more aware than usual of trust, feeling cautious about where I place it, observing that everywhere I go people seem to be talking about other people.  This makes me more and more uncomfortable, this behavior.  As I’ve acknowledged many times, I’m a porous person, but lately that aspect of my personality is frankly overwhelming, and I can’t get out of my own way.  Every day I am startled by sharp words and sliced by unexpected, jagged emotions.

And still.

And yet.

The parade of glorious sunsets out my window takes my breath away and almost every night my heart lifts as I tuck my children in.  There is so much beauty here, even in a month that has been difficult for reasons I don’t understand.

Is this what happiness is, the awareness of all this grandeur even in the midst of painful hours?  I don’t know.  I told someone recently I’m not sure traditional, unalloyed “happiness” is part of my emotional arsenal.  But this feeling may well be contentment.  And that, I’ll take.

This is relatively new to me, this thrum of peace underneath all of the emotion.  In July I observed in myself a sturdy sense of joy and it’s this that is carrying me now, I think.

Inside me there has been a kind of deep settling and an emotional sigh.  Now, when I glance at all the corners of my life I notice both the piles of dusty regrets and the glittering treasures.

I can’t imagine a better way to live my life.  And for this, I offer the most profound thanksgiving I know how to express.

I say the only prayer I know how to say: thank you.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see. – Roethke

This is the darkest season.  Here in the northeast, with still more than a month to go until the shortest day, we are enfolded in the dark by five.

It’s fair to say that the contrast, interplay, and interrelation between light and dark is one of the central preoccupations of my life.  I’m fascinated by the way one allows the other, the way we need both to live in this world, the fact that light and dark are at once polar opposites and so closely related as to be two sides of the same coin.  When I search my archives for “light” I come up with 33 pages of results.

You might imagine that I have strong emotions about this particular time of the year, these week of deep darkness.

And you would be right.  I used to dread this time.  I can easily recall the physical sensation of gloom and fear that came over me as the days shortened.  And it’s true that in the spring, perhaps around February, I am buoyed when I begin to notice that the days are creeping longer.

But I don’t dread these dark days anymore.  I actually love them.  There’s something deeply reassuring to me about this season.  I’ve written extensively about my attachment to the solstice, and that is surely part of this comfort.  It isn’t hard for me to summon a roomful of candles, and to know how quickly they can dispel the darkness.

There is more going on, though.  I suspect it has something to do with the Roethke quote above, or with Wendell Berry’s lyrical lines which run through my head all the time:

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 travelled by dark feet and dark wings.

– Wendell Berry

Berry asserts that to really know the dark we have to surrender to it.  We have to let our eyes adjust, which means we must go in without any external light.  And that, in that darkness, there is a beauty that we never imagined.

It’s a short leap from thinking about the darkness out the window to the darkness inside myself.  I am still getting to know the darkness there, learning to gaze into the ragged hole that exists in the center of all of our souls, practicing pushing on the bruise and feeling the wound.  I have often described the feeling of that intense darkness as staring into the sun.  Again, light and dark are so close together as to be inextricable, sliding across each other, both occluding and showcasing as they do so.

Maybe that’s what this life is: an eclipse.

It has only been when I have really let myself lean into that darkness, accept that my deepest wound is the profound sadness of impermanence, that I’ve started seeing the gifts that are there.  As I sink into the way my life actually is, everyday I find unexpected gems buried in the mundane.  Sure, I also cry a lot more.  I grieve and mourn constantly, far more than I imagined possible.

But there’s also beauty here.  Surprising, staggering, serendipitous beauty.  Divinity buried in the drudgery.  Dark feet and dark wings.

Every year I feel more at ease in these dark days, protected, somehow.  I realize now that this is a manifestation of my increased comfort with my own darkness.  I have begun to see.

Two of these paragraphs were originally written and shared in January 2011.  They are even truer now.

Where is the line between being gentle with myself and not trying hard enough?  I have never been able to reliably locate that border.  At all.  When I wrote about a difficult yoga practice one, and the realization that what I want in this life might be summed up in one word – ease – someone commented that maybe a gritted-teeth practice might not lead me where I want to go.

And of course, of course, that’s true.  But on the other hand, doesn’t the road to transcendence wind through a jungle of sometimes-scary hard work?  That’s what I always thought.  I’m prone to give up before something gets truly hard – this is especially germane in the physical realm.  People have always told me I’m disciplined, and I’m complimented when I hear that, but inside my head a little voice says: oh if only you knew.  All I can hear is a loud la-la-la and litany of all the times I haven’t done as much or gone as far as I think I should have.

Is this just another version of imposter syndrome?

The truth is I don’t know.  When I was a child I used to be fascinated by the idea of relative pain.  For example, when I have a crushing headache, would that be something another person would brush off, or something that would send them to the ER?  I did not know, and I still don’t.  Of course what I do know now is it doesn’t matter, because all we have is our own experience to calibrate (and, for the record, I now relate everything to the pain of my 38 hour unmedicated labor with a posterior baby, which functions as a pretty unshakeable 10 on the 0-10 pain scale).

The question of being kind vs. giving up is like this, I think.  It’s so personal, so subjective, the only relevant data we have is our own.  It feels like letting myself off the hook to not want to hold bridge for the extra 5 seconds, and I’m often disappointed in myself when I come down.  Or when I go to sleep rather than writing another page.  How do I figure out if this is the precise gentleness I need in a moment or if I should have pushed myself further?  I genuinely don’t know the answer.

How do I ascertain when I need to go and when I need to stop?  When to push and when to ease up?  What it is to be softer with myself?