December Worthy Stuff

Susan Edition

Hello!

I hardly need to tell you it’s December—season of goodness and craziness and love and loneliness and want and bounty and inadequacy and stress and joy and too much and…well…just all of it! Did I miss anything or anyone? I’ve felt every one of those emotions this week, and it’s only Wednesday.

Darkness.

We may as well start where we are. Can darkness count as a worthy thing? Some people a lot smarter than I am insist it does, and on a philosophical level, I’m with them. But the SAD part of me has a harder time buying it. Still, in my hemisphere, December insists I embrace the dark. Right now, this poem is helping:

Oh let me be willing to sit in the empty dark
And let the darkness enter me.
Let me not pretend to know how it will be.
Let me lose my plans, though it terrifies me.
Let me not imagine any better time
To practice than now.
Let me be the bowl that sings when touched,
The bowl that is content with its own stillness.
If I want answers, let me sit with my longing.
If I want lessons, let me find them right here.
And if it is dark, let me not run from the dark,
But lean into it. And if it is light,
Let me long for the light. Let it enter me.
Let me not pretend to know how it will be.

—Rosemary Wahtola Trommer, The Empty Dark

Meanwhile, ‘tis the season of light—smack dab in the middle of the reign of darkness, a paradox I’ve always thought to be a fine example of one of our noblest human habits: making the best of what we have….or don’t.

On the trees and in the windows and across the twinkling eaves, everyone is reaching for that thing we need most, putting into the world for ourselves what’s missing.

I have a long history of struggling with winter, particularly in MN (which is where I am struggling with it right this minute). This year, I came for the whole month rather than just for Christmas, partly to show myself that I could.

Madeleine L’Engle is quoted as saying, “winter reveals structure,” the parts hidden underneath the flashy flora of other seasons. Sometimes I need to get stripped down to my own icy branches to remember what’s there.

Through the light and lens of simplicity, sight can become insight.