At the end of 2023, I got to participate in a beautiful writing workshop by Sylvia Lindsteadt.  One of the exercises was to write a short piece of mostly metaphors about something in nature we’ve encountered around our home. We read the poem, Vixen, by W.S. Merwin, as inspiration (do check it out). I chose the mourning dove, who just that past fall had perched and nested outside our guest bedroom window to hatch two baby mourning doves.

Keening woman
Weaver of the dark cry
Devotee of the line between life and death
Gaze-holding protector
Mama bear with wings
Creator of the precarious home, perched milk maiden
Stalwart songstress, painting caves of forgetting
Nesting magician, world-maker, whisperer of swift farewells

Is there a creature, a tree, or a flower that you encounter around your home or neighborhood that might inspire you to write a short metaphor-filled dedication? 

The turning of the calendar – the man-made calendar, the calendar that was superimposed on the earth.

The new year in the celtic world, from which my ancestors come, would be Samhain, the end of October. The year begins with the last harvest and the descent into darkness.

It’s only a couple of months difference, but ideologically much farther away from our modern calendar which seems to indicate an end in the darkness.

It says something, to me anyway, about the relationship my ancestors had with the natural world and the acknowledgment or maybe reverence of the wisdom and potency of the darkness.

The darkness is the beginning, it is that from which everything comes.

There’s dark shit that no amount of creativity and light can undo or make not have happened.
There’s darkness that doesn’t need to be filtered or burdened by an expectation of a healing to come.

Darkness happens. It exists.
And sometimes it is part of a cycle of emergence. And sometimes it’s unbearable.
And sometimes we find ways to bear the unbearable anyway.
And sometimes in the bearing, something else comes forth.

Whenever we sense our beginning, our personal turn of the year, may we be held by something or someone or somewhere that helps us bear the unbearable. And may we be mirrored and uplifted in our joy and radiance.

I don’t live on the edge in the same way. And yet, if I were to honor whatever edge might be present for me in this modern age, it might be one between light and dark, between activity and stillness, and a turning from outward orientation to inward orientation. Can I follow the guidance of the land and its cycles, lean into the fallow ground, the quiet and the dark to listen for a different kind of connection?

We’ve only been living in our current home for a year now, but I distinctly remember how quiet it was walking on one particular street last winter. When the snow was on the ground, early morning, cocooned by trees, evergreens and bare branches both, it was the silence that I noticed and enjoyed. I felt alive in a different way than when the spring birds are singing. It felt like the environment, the air, the land was right up close to my skin, and that I was right up against it, willingly intimate, no place to hide.

I am getting ahead of myself a bit here; we are still another month or two away from that kind of winter, but it’s coming. And likely if we pay attention enough to ourselves, we will notice some kind of response to the shift, whether we are longing for it, anticipating it, resisting it or even ignoring it.

Can we make a conscious noticing, even honoring, of whatever our experience is of this time of year? Even though the answer may not always be comfortable or pleasant, can we ask ourselves what the darkness makes us feel closer to in our lives? And what nourishes us as we head into the dark still cold night?

Three poems in the elevenie form:

Dark
Deepens knowing
In places ancestral
No need to fear
Transformation

Being that we are in the height of summer here in the northern hemisphere, I thought I would share a poem that I have worked with recently that expresses “wild love” for the sun. I was born just after the summer solstice, and I love swimming in the summer ocean, but my body and temperament struggle with the hot humid heat of deep summer. It feels a bit more tolerable living outside of a city right now, but I still find myself counting down the days until I can enjoy a cool fall breeze. In light of that, I am working on expanding my capacity to appreciate the summer, and I share this poem by Mary Oliver with that inspiration in mind.

What would your poem to the Sun say?

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance –
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love –
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun
reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed–
or have you too
turned from this world–

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?