When words seem to fail...reflections on darkness and light

Winter solstice. We mark the longest darkness here in the north. But the promise of emergent sunlight heralds not yet warmth but rather the beginning, the deepening of the long cold of winter.

My  neighborhood...

How often here in Wisconsin that brilliant returning sunlight of January is accompanied by the coldest temperatures of the year. They go together.

Like today. I live along  Lake Michigan so we didn't get hit by the big snows here, mostly a lot of rain. Under the clouds all week long, our temps have hovered much above normal. The lake is unusually warm for this time of year, which is why we are having trouble turning precipitation into snow. When the sun reappeared just now, as if making a grand entrance on the stage of the solstice, I realized how long its been since we've seen it. And it comes on the tail end of the storm, on the howling winds of a night cast into cold, darkness, and silence as the power went out.

"Poetry's true perception..." - or memoir's

I struggle through memoir and poems these days. The memoir is in a hard place, the diminishment and long dying of my mother - an extraordinary journey we shared together. It opens up a raw, tender place - vulnerable, bursting with compassion and love...

And then I just miss her.

Since I started this writing project I also started writing poetry. That surprised me at first, now it doesn't at all. Now I begin to understand it.

What was freed up in the journey, what was let go, and then what the fierce concentration on that narrative opened even more, has freed up the place where poems are apparently born - at least, it appears, for me.

Opening the Gates...

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield's remarkable book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. She is one of my favorite poets and the Buddhist spirituality that lies beneath so much of her work really resonates for me right now.

I don't claim to be a poet, and yet I have written poetry mostly to help open some of my own gates, to make me a better writer. There is something writing poetry does to you, if you are willing to plumb the depths, go to the depths fearlessly, or, if with fear, bravely, to see what you find there. The poetry that changes everything is the poetry that does what Buddhism invites us to do: it looks deeply. And, as Thich Nhat Hanh has written, "Looking deeply requires courage."

The poet must have courage.