in the bleak midwinter, the promise of a solstice means everything.
Dark and cold, life far far far away, and can it come back? Is it too dark, too cold, too hopeless? Too bleak? These are the forever questions of deep winter, the reason for celebrating winter solstice, and if you are Christian, a reason for celebrating the birth of Christ. If you live somewhere warm, these aspects of solstice or Christmas might not have the same easy resonance as if you live in a place with dark and cold winters, short days and long nights, earth that really does get hard as iron and water like a stone.
If you’ve read very many posts on my blog, you won’t be that surprised to know that I cry very easily and am quickly moved. (unexplained here, but I cry when I hear the Spice Girls sing Say You’ll Be There.) ANYWAY. This video presents my very favorite song of this season, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” It features the Gloucester Cathedral Choir, so it gathers so many things I love — the song, a choir, in a beautiful cathedral. Although I was raised to be a Christian, my personal beliefs have fractured and aren’t easily categorized into anything other than the vague handwavey “spiritual,” but this song makes me cry and feel kind of cracked open, if you know what I mean.
If you have ever stood in a dark or bleak place and wondered about hope, or redemption, or life, or recovery, or cycles, this song speaks to that place. I have a whole playlist of different versions of this song (Judy Collins has a beautiful version), and never get tired of hearing it at this time of year:
I remember one bitter cold, clear night when I was a teenager in north Texas. The earth really did turn to iron then; as they like to say, there’s nothing between Wichita Falls and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence. I had no place to go, and I lay on the street in a dark alley, staring at the sky. The night could scarcely have been darker or colder, and I lay there looking at the bright stars, aware that no one knew where I was and I felt truly all alone on the face of the earth….a feeling that easily haunts me, all these years later. But the despair of that night passed, that awful winter passed, that bleakness passed — as those things always do. Light does return; warmth comes back; life forces itself out of those hard places that look dead; you just have to wait and believe that it will happen, even when it doesn’t feel possible.
lift your heart
Bliss out, man.
following light is a good thing in the bleak end of winter
Do you know the blog perches in the soul? I can’t remember how I found her blog, now, but hers is one of my favorite blogs in my blogroll. When I see her blog in the old Google Reader, something settles inside me, and I can reliably expect to read something that makes me happy, and to see pictures that make me smile – not least because her beautiful son is usually right there in the middle of it, with his big smile.
Here, on this last day of February, she writes:
In the month of March, we will be following light, reflecting in pictures and words on the details that light reveals in different hours of the day.
I’m in! My spirit fades and gets pretty thin this time of year. My genes are so profoundly Texan, I’m completely hardwired for a very brief winter; the long period of cold and gray up north just wears me down, man. And yet I do know that you can find what you look for, if only you look.
Another blog I follow is needled – the blogger (Kate) lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s a professor specializing in textiles, she knits, and her blog is always fascinating. And one month ago she had a pretty serious stroke. Since my dearest friend here in NY had a stroke a year ago, I’ve been closely following Kate and her progress. It’s impossible to make fair comparisons between two people, no matter what – and just as true when people are grappling with what looks like similar problems. Kate has the benefit of much better health care than we have here (so obvious it hardly needed to be said), and I obviously don’t know the extent of what she is facing, AND she’s in the early stages. But I have been so struck by her attitude of ‘ok then! time to work hard.’ Today’s post is about her gratitude for the various tools that help her regain independence. Those things are there – and what they give her – but she is looking at them, and that makes a lot of difference. She could just as easily look at her need for them, and come away with a different sense of things.
So join me, join perches in the soul, let’s follow light. The middle week of March I will be on the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras, where the light will be oh-so-easy to follow, but I still have the remaining weeks of March in Manhattan, where following light will require a bit more looking. I think wherever you are, though, there are days when following light requires an effort.
Happy last day of February, happy Sunday.
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