The smallest bit of beauty

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Nature teaches us that the moment when darkness is greatest is also the moment that light is about to return.

[In Iran] On the winter solstice families gather for a feast and surround themselves with candles, eat pomegranates and nuts, and recite poetry. “It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before. It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”

Medieval Persian writings suggested that if one could not afford a feast, it is enough to bring a flower, “Look for the smallest bit of beauty around you. That very much resonates today, at a time where it seems like the mega-systems are all broken or falling apart, to return your gaze to the small.”

Omid Safi, professor of Iranian studies at Duke University, describing the 2,500 year old Iranian winter tradition of Yalda in the New York Times

Inner things

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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

Sunday Quote: Praise

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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

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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

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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

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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