I am writing not to send you light,
but to let you know you are not alone
in the darkness. I am here, too,
scribbling with no sight, no certainty
that the words on the page are legible,
no confidence you will receive this.
Still this impulse to reach out,
this longing to honor this deepening darkness,
though it is confusing, disorienting.
I find myself reminding myself
such darkness is natural, essential even,
and there is some comfort
in knowing this, in trusting I am part
of some great process, even though
it terrifies me. This is how the world
has been made and remade.
Of course we are no different
than stars. Perhaps you are not frightened.
But I am. Maybe this is why I reach out.
Because it takes so much courage
to trust the dark place, to attend to its demands,
to believe this is not the end, but a pause,
a stage between one world and another.
Please, don’t send me light either.
I don’t think I am ready yet, the pain still sharp,
not yet softened, not yet become wings,
though part of me longs to have already
arrived on the other side of transformation.
Perhaps you are reaching for me, too.
Perhaps you have already written
on this page, and because it is dark,
I can’t read what you’ve said.
Perhaps believing this makes me less alone.
And this is why I write.
Posts Tagged ‘darkness’
Letter to the Others in the Dark
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aloneness, darkness, fear, maturity, writing on January 7, 2025| 21 Comments »
Before Winter Solstice, I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, night, solstice on December 17, 2024| 5 Comments »
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.
Amidst the Cold of Winter
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Art, darkness, family, ice, light, memory, play, river, winter on July 23, 2024| 12 Comments »
There was that winter day when the ice floe
had cracked the river ice into giant slabs
thick as my open hand, tall as a child.
Our family gathered on the river bank
and played with the fractured chunks to make
sculptures—ice huts and ice caves and
a long ice wall that curved and snaked
through the snow along the river’s edge
like the spine of a giant stegosaurus,
jagged and upright. It’s never happened
again. The ice slabs always freeze together
or crush into bits, but that night,
we went out with dozens of candles
and lit the ice structures from within.
And the glow then, the gold that blazed
through the ice, was the kind of luminous
magic that winter seldom knows. What
was shattered and sharp, heavy and cold,
became radiance, brilliance, a visible hope
I didn’t yet know I would need, some proof
of what might transpire in the winter
of the heart—how broken and frigid,
it still might become a means
to gather beauty, to amplify the light.
Skiing in the Dark
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, identity, skiing on January 13, 2024| 8 Comments »
Though you know by heart
this valley with its river,
its sheer red walls,
its ragged peaks,
in this moment all you see
is the dull glow of snow
a few feet in front of you
and dim shadows almost
suggesting the track,
and the whole world shrinks
to lungs and legs and stroke
and glide and it feels so good
to be outside, to move
through night guided more
by ears and less by eyes,
to slide through the world
a foot at a time and whoever
you were before this,
that’s not who you are now,
sweet creature of heartbeat,
stranger to the next moment.
Tinder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, fire, language, morning on January 8, 2024| 8 Comments »
Sometimes, long before the sun rises,
you whisper good morning,
and it’s as if you’ve built a small fire
in the hearth of predawn,
each syllable a small flame
leaping up in the dark,
a welcome kindling.
It takes so little to fill the room
with warmth, with light.
What the Dark Might Say
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, love, night on February 12, 2023| 4 Comments »
What I love tonight about candlelight,
is the way it teaches me about the night—
how the night presses against the windows,
how it cradles the room in a dusky embrace.
How the dark is not like a palm that,
when pressed to a chest,
must stop when it meets the skin—
no, the dark is more like love
that moves through any boundaries
to touch everything.
If there is a longing in me
to be anywhere but here,
it does not show up.
It has lost its feet
and does not try to run away.
Tonight, the darkness offers to smooth
the parts of me that want to run, to hide.
Tender as a womb, the dark kisses my fears.
It says, Sweetheart, I will hold you.
No matter how small your light tonight, I will hold you.
The Darkness Writes to Rosemerry
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness on December 7, 2022| 12 Comments »
I will teach you to know the world
by the way your song bounces from the surfaces of things—
to make light inside your own body
like the angler fish that swim in the deep.
I will teach you to open your eyes wide, then wider
until you see what you thought could not be seen.
And I will teach you to bloom for no other eyes,
to bloom only for the pleasure of blooming.
The Long Marriage
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, intimacy, loss, marriage, touch on December 6, 2022| 14 Comments »
Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
that nightly shrine
where my belly meets your spine,
where the bend of my knees
meets the bend of your knees,
where my warmth meets your warmth,
the night a vase
in which we place
the stems of our bodies,
in which I know myself
through touch.
And nothing must be said
and nothing must be done
except to meet the long familiar flesh,
this honoring of nakedness.
Perhaps I know you best in the dark—
these lightless hours when
we sit in the midst of brokenness
and my hand finds your hand,
and my silence finds your silence,
my loss finds your loss,
and together, somehow,
we find peace.
And nothing can be said.
And nothing can be done
to change the past.
We meet in the these darkened hours,
with nothing but our willingness
to meet these darkened hours,
these hours we would have pushed away,
these hours that bring us closer to each other.
What the Peach Knows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, development, fruit, peach, soul, sweetening on December 4, 2022| 7 Comments »
It is night
that keeps the peach
from ripening too fast,
the cool of the dark
that allows the sugar
to develop, to grow—
oh soul, is it any wonder
I have started
to pray for longer nights?
One Secret
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, night, wishing on November 30, 2022| 4 Comments »
not the brilliant stars
but the infinite dark
what I wish on