The season has turned, not without a groan, and it is now officially Winter. I had a sound if dreamless sleep last night, a small good thing. I thought it was important to succumb fully to the darkness of the longest night of the year and, Morpheus be blessed, I did just that. Having consciously prepared this year for the turning of the season and the light, I feel fortified to face what the next three months may bring—the gifts and the challenges alike. I sense that in this year's visit to the seasonal underworld I will find new wells of creativity but also confront ever-darkening shadows as the virus brings on its most pervasive and lethal surge yet. Even with the vaccination effort underway, it is going to be a winter of largely unmitigated death and destruction. Moreover, we are faced with twenty-nine more days of Trump’s final, wild spin into madness and fascist desperation until Biden is sworn in as President on January 20. Between the plague and politics (really, the same thing anymore), this winter will test us to an unprecedented degree. In the meantime, I continue to hold the tension of opposites in my family with regard to my mother’s need for care and my siblings' and my wildly divergent strategies for avoiding--or not as the case may be--the plague. I am resigned to the fact that this “holding the tension” will continue to be my primary task in the wintry underworld to which we have all just descended. I can only hope that Demeter above will howl for our salvation and start early and determinedly her efforts to return us in Spring to a world where the virus has been suppressed effectively and where we can experience rebirth--our own and the planet's. Well, one can certainly hope for such a brave new world.
As I look out the windows on three sides of my studio, the weather is a study in opposites. It’s cold and blustery, and the clouds have just shifted in parts of the sky to reveal a vivid blue dome where an hour ago it was a low, vaulted, steel ceiling. Meanwhile, although the darker, denser cloud masses are racing rapidly across the firmament and seemingly off stage, they still dominate the skyline in one direction. Given this celestial duality, the lighting is extraordinary: on the sunlit side of my view, the shadows of the tree limbs dancing in the wind cast stark and eerily shifting shadows on the neighboring houses and the grass. From another view, the bare trees standing under still-leaden skies remain cloaked in their heavy grey cloud-mantles. Through this meteorological prism, I can see that today, this first day of winter, the Cailleach has begun her wintry peregrinations.
To end, a poem from that sensual mystic, D.H. Lawrence:
Fatality
No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree once it has fallen off.
And no one, not God or Christ nor any other
can put back a human life into connection with the cosmos
once the connection has been broken
and the person has become finally self-centered.
Death alone, through the long processes of disintegration
can melt the detached life through the dark Hades at the root of the tree
into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.
