A midwinter's tale

One night in midwinter, we walked upon the frozen lake. 




One night, thousands of small lights showed us our path, so we could not get lost. 

We slid-slipped-shifted but did not fall

We passed under echoing bridges like swans

crunched over shaved ice, thick-crystaled coldness

over ice roses, frost ferns, inscribing our presence

guided by glimmering candle stars,

over fishes who slept silver-mailed and still, 

over long sleeping water grasses

over turtles dreaming in hidden caverns

over deep springs bubbling forth feeding the waters, 

even when all appears still, 

even in winter.

The moon cast a secret light, hiding and slipping from cloud 

and the leaping fires called to the people, 

whose gazes softened in the glow of their bright flames, their daylight tempers sweetened by hot cups of chocolate, 

remembering their first loves, and the deep-snowed winters of their childhoods, 

and dreaming the waters beneath their feet once again set free in spring's flickering light.  

Then we walked out to the islands, to places only mallards and geese and hawks go. We stand where we've never stood, amazed under the darkling trees, and look back over our shoulders to shore,

where a the procession of ice walkers pay homage to the night, to winter, to darkness and coldness and to holding it close as a lover.  

One night, we were warmed by the fire in ice and the ice in fire, by pillars and pyramids, glittering globes and chalices cupping small soft flames that flickered and went out,

and were lit again by kneeling acolytes who bear ever-burning matches.

Dark three times

You live in a small, dusty Midwestern town, sometime in the 1930s. A town of creaky screen doors, faded flower-print dresses waving on clotheslines, chicken coops, cornfields and white wood-frame churches, where the night sky is still lit only by fireflies and the Milky Way.

It is an utterly ordinary dusty town. People listen to the radio in the evenings after they wash the supper dishes, and the only strangers occasionally encountered are the neighbors' out-of-town relatives or the door-to-door salesmen who come from other small and dusty towns.

And it is so dark and quiet at night. Quiet with a fine, silvered silence broken only by hoot owls, crickets, nighthawks and the rustle of the corn as the fox slinks through the stalks.

The townspeople mostly close their windows to this particular music, since warmth and safety can feel hard to come by.

One day in late autumn, when the harvest is in and bees cluster in their hives—an overcast day, when crows roost in the bare branches and caw loudly at small boys—a gypsy wagon with faded paint and gilded rosettes sets up on the edge of this dusty town.

Nobody knows where the wagon came from, or what it's for; but, being so unexpected, so unusual, the wagon (and the odd sounds that come from inside) stirs up a wondering that slowly builds as the afternoon passes.

Finally that evening, the townspeople hear the winding, beguiling melodies of a strange music wafting over the corn fields. Composed of accordion and clarinet and fiddle and they don't know what all...but the woman's voice calls to them, so they shrug on their coats and go, walking in pairs or bunches as the excited children race around them in the dark. After all, despite the dullness of their ordinary town, aren't they as curious as any other human creatures? And as drawn to magic and mystery?

So they gather on the edges, in that liminal space between town and not-town; wild and not-wild. They gather in the dark, under the moon, by the light of the leaping violet fire, where a ragtag company of musicians play well-worn instruments late, late into the night. Laughingly they gather on hay bales set around the encampment. Some close their eyes and sway slightly as the otherworldly, dark-velvet music enwraps them. Some shyly waltz together in that hinterland where the flashing edges of the firelight dance with the darkness.

And for a while, they are reminded that this world, which encompasses and breathes through themselves and every other living thing, is an enormous, unfolding story, of which each is part. That darkness is the other side of brightness, and joy the other side of pain.

The music to which they danced and dreamed that night sounded like this.

Ashes

Celebrate

Dark Dark Dark are based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While they don't to my knowledge travel via gypsy caravan, they do tour nomadically around the world.

Standing still

Fire.

Roaring, snapping, flickering fire. Blossoming to life beneath our hands, warming our bodies, beguiling our eyes, comforting our light-hungry spirits....

Entering the longest, darkest night of the Northern hemisphere, I long for fire.

The slow, mesmerizing dance of flames entrances human creatures in the way that only another elemental force—flowing water—can. Gaze upon this glorious, ever-changing, fulminating flower, and you are swallowed by the Now. You live your existence in leaping flames, free for a timeless moment from circling thoughts that pull you away from Here. You are fully present and still...at rest, at peace. Like calls to like: This living creature brightly burning in the darkness is an analog for the shining spark of life we each carry within.

Before dawn on this shortest of days, the solstice—stillness—held us so close, lulling us in sleep, whispering of rest, renewal; of cold things in stasis and warm, fur-bearing beings nestled deep in dens, noses tucked under tails.

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness, it has been said. Better yet to love both darkness and shadow—as essential and rightful to this world as light. For only in the deepest darkness can we see the endlessly roaring fires of the stars, and most wholly love both the darkness and the flame.

But for today, the Winter Solstice, Darkness is our music, and Light, our beloved dance partner.

Winter solstice: 5:12am this day, in this place.