Today is the Winter Solstice. Yet, all of this year had some qualities of winter.
In a way, winter is the real spring,
the time when the inner things happen,
the resurge of nature.
Edna O’Brien, Irish writer
Inner things
Category: Be fully present
Sunday Quote: Praise
O tell us, poet, what you do?
— I praise.
But those, dark, deadly, devastating ways,
how do you bear them, suffer them?
— I praise.
But the nameless, the anonymous. How, Poet, can you still invoke it?
– I praise.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Praise
Make a poem
Some words for these, the darkest days of the year: Silence, praise and inner life.
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence,
like prayers prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb the silence
from which it came.
Wendell Berry, How to Be a Poet
Freedom
From the 17th to the 23rd of December a special sequence of invocations have been prayed, since at least the 5th Century. The one for today remembers the Israelites journey out of slavery in Egypt:
O Adonai, You appeared to Moses in the burning bush,
and gave him the Law on Sinai:
come and save us with an outstretched arm.
The word in Hebrew – Mitzraim – means “a narrow place”, so “going out from Egypt” can mean going from a place where we are stuck, to a wider place, a place where we are free. Many of us have felt stuck this year, so this ancient desire at this time, the darkest days of the year, reflects a deep longing to be freed, to see where we are trapped and to let go of what is dead in our lives.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte, Sweet Darkness
Every step
Courage is like – it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts.
It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.
Mary Daly
Another life
We are born with only one obligation – to be completely who we are. Yet how much of our time is spent comparing ourselves to others, dead and alive? This is encouraged as necessary in the pursuit of excellence. Yet a flower in its excellence does not yearn to be a fish, and a fish in its unmanaged elegance does not long to be a tiger. But we humans find ourselves always falling into the dream of another life. Or we secretly aspire to the fortune or fame of people we don’t really know. When feeling badly about ourselves, we often try on other skins rather than understand and care for our own. Yet when we compare ourselves to others, we see neither ourselves nor those we look up to. We only experience the tension of comparing, as if there is only one ounce of being to feed all our hungers.
Mark Nepo, The Book Of Awakening
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