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Snowy view out my window on this solstice day. I think it’s going to be a white Christmas, which is always fun. Tonight we’ll celebrate, with the Vogts and the 30+ year tradition. The Woods will be with us which it really special. And this weekend I’ll get to see Hadley and John and their children, as well as other dear friends.
As always, I’m thinking about those I love most fiercely on this short and meaningful day. Today’s the fulcrum on which the dark and the light pivot. On this darkest day of the year, I usually feel quite light, full of love for those nearest to me and anticipating the increasing lengthening of days.
I remember one solstice, several years ago, in particular. It had been a sunny day, so the sunset was more marked than today’s will be. I was at the gym, running and looking out the window as the sun went down. It really struck me, that sunset: it looked like one of those pictures taken from space, where you could see the orange shining from beyond the edge of the curved darkness – I felt aware of all of those who had died, as though I could see them, almost, just beyond the horizon. I don’t know why that moment, and that afternoon, has stayed so vividly in my memory but I always think of it on this day – and think of Nana, and Gaga, and Ba, and Susie, and Mr. Valhouli, and others who have gone ahead of us into the sunset. Into, a place, I trust, with far more light than we ever see here on earth.

Toward the Solstice, 1977

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
Over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
Rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
Down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
All the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
On this old slanting roof,
The slanted field below
Thickens with winter’s first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year’s wind
Stand nakedly in the green,
Stand sullenly in the slowly whitening,
Field.
My brain glows
More violently, more avidly
The quieter, the thicker
The quilt of crystals settles,
The louder, more relentlessly
The torrent beats itself out
On the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
The thirtieth of November,
A beginning or an end.
We are moving towards the solstice
And there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
My life is tangled
With dead weeds, thistles,
Enormous burdocks, burdens
Slowly shifting under
This first fall of snow,
Beaten by this early, racking rain
Calling all new life to declare itself strong
Or die,
If I could know
In what language to addrses
The spirits that claim a place
Beneath these low and simple ceilings,
Tenants that neither speak nor stir
Yet dwell in mute insistence
Till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.
If history is a spider-thread
Spun over and over though brushed away
It seems I might some twilight
Or dawn in the hushed country light
Discern its greyness stretching
From molding or doorframe, out
Into the empty dooryard
And following it climb
The path into the pinewoods,
Tracing from tree to tree
In the falling light, in the slowly
Lucidifying day
Its constant, purposive trail,
Till I reach whatever cellar hole
Filling with snowflakes or lichen,
Whatever fallen shack
Or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
And there, under the first or last
Star, trusting to instinct
The words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
Year after year, winter
After summer, the right rune
To ease the hold of the past
Upon the rest of my life
And ease my hold on the past.
If some rite of separation
Is still unaccomplished,
Between myself and the long-gone
Tenants of this house,
Between myself and my childhod,
Between the childhood of my children,
It is I who have neglected
To perform the needed acts,
Set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
In front of mirrors,
Or merely pause and listen
To my own pulse vibrating
Lightly as falling snow,
Relentless as the rainstorm,
And hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
For them to make some clear demand
Some articulate sound or gesture,
For release to come from anywhere
But from inside myself.
A decade of cutting away
Dead flesh, cauterizing
Old scars ripped open over and over
And still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
The loving humdrum acts
Of attention to this house
Transplanting lilac suckers,
Washing panes, scrubbing
Wood-smoke from splitting paint,
Sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
Of the spider aside,
And so much yet undone,
A woman’s work, the solstice nearing,
And my hand still suspended
As if above a letter
I long and dread to close.

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. – Woodrow Wilson

The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star. – Arthur Miller

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we spend our time. Our time, which is, after all, the only really valuable currency we have. Our hours are our life, right? It’s both how I allocate those hours and how I feel when I’m in them. Certainly the adult I spend the most time with is Anastasia. It feels frustratingly difficult to actually coordinate with the people I want to see most. There are the people whose paths I cross regularly, most of whom are a complete joy to see: Grace and Whit’s classmates’ parents, people at work, neighbors. But the ability to spend time focused on another person, truly just being with them, is so rare. Especially for me, who is often not mentally in the same place I am physically. Very often I waste the hours I do have thinking about other things, thinking forward or thinking back. The corollary here is that I am not really living my life, of course. There are very few people with whom I’m relieably 100% there, in the moment, not wanting to be somewhere else. This reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s musings on meditation in E,P,L – the absolute agony of 45 minutes alone in her head. That is certainly how I feel!

Silent Night. This morning was the school holiday sing-a-long. We also woke up to a foot of snow. I had a major, dramatic, slow-motion wipeout en route to school and arrived snowy and late. But it was lovely. All the Beginners had paper snowflakes on their heads and to my pleasant surprise we sang songs about Kwanzaa, Chanukah, AND Christmas. We closed with Silent Night. I whispered to Grace, as the song started, “This was my Nana’s favorite carol,” and she looked at me with liquid eyes and said, “She’s in Heaven, right?” I love all carols, but Silent Night has particular resonance. It reminds me of Nana, and it also transports me back to the Exeter chapel, by candlelight, on a Thursday night in December, 1990. I was sitting with Eric and it was the holiday evening prayer service. For some reason it is one of the most vivid memories I have of the two years at Exeter.