the dark beautiful

I’m drawn to these burrow-down weeks, their shrunken hours, the sunlessness that parentheses the days. My animal-self curls inward and rests. I’ve always been drawn to the dark - not the darkness of demons or evil intentions - but the female places, womb-like and secretive, where seeds go to work, where death is turned back into life.

I love all the seasons, truly, except maybe the fierce, draining energy of high Summer, but these weeks of Advent, these slow unspooling days when we whisper our way toward Solstice and the light’s return are surely some of my favorites.

I’ve borrowed from the Waldorf tradition in planning the Advent observations this year, with its focus on the natural world. Nothing obtrusive, just some candles and whatever beauty comes to hand when I am outdoors. If this year has done anything for me it has worn away any remaining affection I had for the artificial and disconnected. In these Winter days I will find the dark beautiful, the aging leaf, the barren and the damp, the biting morning air, as well as the warm and secure house, the candles and lamps, the stocked larders, the loved ones, that make finding such beauty possible.

I wonder if my welcome of the darkness is exaggerated by the intensity of the year we are leaving behind. I read my journal entries from early 2020 like they are from a stranger’s diary. Who was that woman so confidently and blithely moving forward? These long months have scoured away the last of my pretense - and strangely, much of my anger. I don’t understand the world I live in, I am not as strong as I thought I was, I have given my allegiance to unworthy things. And yet what emerges is not despair or frustration, but peace.

Just recently I have woken in the mornings with words on my mind. I’d thought, maybe, my identity as a writer was dying with this painful year, yet another old skin I was discarding. But of course, like all beings, our creativity must welcome its own winter, its own dark womb of regeneration, in order to keep living. I already know it will emerge changed; I can wait.

I’d love to hear what these Winter days before Solstice are like for you this year. Are you able to welcome the dark hours? Or does it feel too much after all we’ve been through these months? I hope you’ll share.

Soundtrack for writing this post: Olafur Arnalds, Some Kind of Peace

Synchronous: from The Paris Review 234/Fall 2020 John Lee Clark/Line of Descent

“…she

called herself the Black Turtle Lady

because the race is not to the swift. It is to the

slow and sure, certain of who we are.”