Midwinter of the spirit

When darkness falls, tend to the candle of your spirit.

On the longest night, sing a song to the sun — that invincible god who burns, yet is not consumed. 

Whisper a blessing to Earth, the Beloved who holds us so close to her, in life and in death. 

Now — at the still point — we remember those who have returned to the earth's womb. 

We wonder what is to come.

We wait — and while we wait, we dream of the blue snow of deep midwinter, lit by the moon's bright chariot and the shine of ice-bound stars.

On the longest night, the fire grows low. 

Hold fast to your evergreen hope. Your red-berried joy. That glowing star that lives deep inside of you, even on the coldest, darkest night. 

And do not let go.  

The Longest Night from Angie Pickman on Vimeo.

The garden of Eden

If I could plant the words I've written in the ground, what would grow from them, I wonder? 

A spiny cactus...?

A sweet fruit...?

A flowering tree...?

A perfect white blossom that unfolds under moonlight, and fades by dawn.

In my garden of self-negating choices grow spines, thistles and stinging nettles. 

This is a garden I have planted and watered. Bramble and thorn. Bitter fruits that poison the spirit. Withered tangles and spines that draw blood, numb the mind, drain away hope.

What are self-negating choices? 

Sometimes you neglect to be the guardian of your own needs and feelings. 

Sometimes you avoid knowing your own unhappiness. 

Sometimes you forget how to care for yourself. 

Sometimes you are the source of your own pain.  

In my garden of kindness is food for everyone. A sacred spring where every creature, every soul can drink the waters of compassion and healing. 

A cool green place to rest when weary. Deep and fertile soil, where the seeds of intention, wish, longing and mystery can take root. 

A place where I can grow into a person I can only imagine right now. 

Is this my true home? 

I plant it with my two hands, and call it my very own. 

'81 by Joanna Newsom

Rose and thorn

 

When the darkness comes and the fire is lit, when you sit together fearing what is to come, that is when someone calls for a song.

One unaccompanied voice rises in the silence. Grief-layered edges speak of sorrow, an ache that stirs longing and holds the loss of all who listen. A melody that sounds like the feeling of heavy clouds, pierced for a moment by a flood of sunlight. The refrain sends a vibration through you; a feeling like what once was, but now is lost.

Yet, at the very center of the calling to grief and sorrow, lay hope and joy. Because the truth is, there is no grief without joy, and no joy without grief. 

One lives within the other, forever intertwined; a briar rose, a blackthorn tree in bloom, a phoenix singing as it bursts into flame.

“Sorrow is not the opposite of joy. Sorrow is walking deeper into joy.”*  

Music, this wordless speech that arrows straight into our hearts. Music, the language of emotion, as art is the language of symbol and image.

Music speaks truths that bypass thought, truths about what it means to be alive. Music (as all we create) originates in an “other” place we cannot delineate or control. Music delivers transcendence, heightening and enlarging our experience as inhabitants of this bitter and sweet world. Music connects us to one another, tells us we belong here.

Music expresses the soul's longing in ways that words cannot.

John O'Donohue said, "Music is what language would love to be if it could." For the most meaningful experiences and emotions in life can be only suggested by words, which are just signifiers or representatives of emotions. Certain states of being may be beyond even the power of poets to tell.

Do you feel that is true?

But music, alive with its own ways of being, speaks to our emotional and physical body with language it understands; penetrates our inner landscapes to inhabit the psyche. The soul. 

There, in that unknowable land, music companions us — as a truth we understand without understanding how, as a story we tell to ourselves.

We help to create and enliven every song and story and poem that we love, simply by loving them. There is no love without co-creation. In loving, we fit together our edges, make their wonder part of ourselves — and gift our own wonder to them. 

What we love, we make our own. We make what we love our own. This, we know. 

We invite inside the song of rose and thorn, hold it fast, feel where it makes us wider and deeper, and make it our own.

And we are changed.

*Susan Cain, Unlocking Us Podcast.

The undying fire

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died

And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

Came people singing, dancing,

To drive the dark away.

—The Shortest Day, Susan Cooper

How it seems that as one grows older, people and times distant take on a glow of solstice fires. 

When you were in that experience, with those people, you had no thought it would come to an end. That your life would not ever expand outward into the world. That loved ones would fall away. That you would somehow—wandering a maze of seemingly disconnected blind turns—dead-end; not at the center but in an edgeland inhabited only by ghosts.

If you had known where your turns would lead you, would you have followed a different path? Useless thoughts, yet the question will be asked.  

Accept that this is your journey, every blind step of it. You are here. There is no "supposed to," only where you are.  Do you trust that is so?

But still, dear friends, I wish we could be together once more around the solstice fire. 

The shape of the celebration was never so important as that you and I were there together, laughing, as the living sparks flew up into the deep night like wishes, and the white owl watched in silence.

Walking through the longest night

One of my wishes for our new home is that I will be able to see much more of the sky than just a meager patch of it through houses, tree branches and electrical lines.

I wish I could see what the moon, stars and the sun are doing, every day. How sad I feel, thinking of how many years of sunsets and moonrises have come and gone with nary a Me to admire them and praise them for their splendor.

I bought a lunar calendar for the new year. To remind me which phase happens when, to help focus my attention, I thought.

But now I recognize this is very sad; because if I could just look at the moon, like humans have looked at it for millions of years, I wouldn't need a calendar to tell me what phase it is in.

I could look up and see for myself.

Such a simple gift it seems, to be able to see the moon and stars in the sky! How could something once so ordinary have become rare and precious? It seems yet another loss in a time of losses.

If by walking the earth we can bless it with our feet, then by watching the sky we can bless it with our sustained gaze.

Is that how you watch the moon? Quietly but rapt, with eyes wide open, as if you gaze upon the beauty of your beloved?

Now I think that what I must have been seeking by purchasing that moon phase calendar was really a heart connection to the moon, a silver line of light between she and I, along which dreams and wordless mysteries would ebb and flow like tides.

What I was wanting most of all was the reassuring presence of the earth's beauty every day. I wanted the moon to be a companion to my nights, not shut away outside away from me but in my eyes and heart, like a prayer.

On this, the longest night of the year, may the moon creep into my dreams, may the low sun cast his birch-pale light over the wildwoods in my heart.

Tangled thoughts

Such a day for darkness. A candle flickers on my writing desk, one tiny fire-star.

Such a day for quiet... my cats sleep downstairs, curled in their ticked fur coats, noses tucked under paws. I imagine that colors dance across their backs, from the twinkle lights around the windows.

Such a day for falling into evening, a pale blue overtaking the heavy clouds just before sunset, and I too stupefied by screen light to do more than set out the cats' dinners and notice that the few words my mind held earlier had fled...leaving only snake tracks through sand and a blur of blue jays.