I dread the “fall back” clock changes of the Daylight
Savings Time cycle. The references to
increasing darkness and lessening light set off ripples of loss—of what has
been and will not be. Of holidays that
are manically portrayed as happy, yet cause so much grief to so many. Of aging. Of dwindling resources. Of
troubling politics. It is hard to hold
hope in this season sometimes.
There is a place in Ireland, Bru na Boinne, that is an ancient
man made mound with a burial cave in the center. It is so dark and still at its heart, that it
is hard to discern what is a human heart beat and what is the earth’s. It is as quiet as a grave, and as still as a
waiting womb. At a particular time of the
Winter Solstice, if the sun is shining, a piercing ray of light will enter
through a door lintel and penetrate to the center with such blinding
brilliance, the chamber looks leafed with solid radiant gold. For 17 precious
minutes of awe, the light sustains. To
the Neolithic culture of the mounds, this moment was a symbolic re-enactment of
fertilization, a reminder that the dark is a place of growth and the cycle of
life is unremitting and relentless.
As autumn days dim and my human spirit quakes that the light
might not return to the day, to the world, to my life or to the lives of those
I sit with, I remember this place, and gratefully breathe in the wisdom of the
Crone archetype, beautifully captured in this poem:
To be of the Earth is to know
The restlessness of being a seed
The darkness of being planted
The struggle toward the light
The pain of growth into the light
The joy of bursting forth and bearing fruit
The love of being food for someone
The scattering of your seeds
The decay of the seasons
The mystery of death
And the miracle of birth. (by J. Soos)
So in this season, when the light fades and the cold creeps
in, when I am vulnerable to questioning hope, I try to remember the life of a
seed, where dark stillness can feel like an end, but is the incubator of
quickening newness. We don’t know what
will emerge, but if we can see the darkness as a rich loam and stay present to
our experience, we enter the cycle of life, where loss makes way for new, hope
is birthed from despair, and dreams can unfold to become real.
May this wintering time be a season of patient incubation
and tending what wants to be “born.”
Notes:
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