Mother Night

It's 10am on a Sunday morning and Ella is still asleep. Bill has left to finish the decking on the house we built last year and I'm alone with the woodstove and the laptop. Outside, grey clouds hang low and the grass, half green half brown, looks naked and exposed. There is a reason this season is called stick season. Everything can be seen through. Neighbors houses, utility poles, trees past trees past trees. Just waiting for snow.

There are four days until the winter solstice. The longest day of the year and one that marks the onset of more gradual light. We have a cut-out of Mother Night that we put on top of the tree each year, in place of a star or angel. In her arms is another paper cut-out of a beautiful sun.

The story goes that Sun, after a full year of rising and setting each day, becomes incredibly tired and doesn't think he can continue with that tiresome cycle any longer. So Night wraps him up in her arms for a good, long rest. All the children wonder why the night has become so long and they wait anxiously for Sun to reappear. While they wait they sing songs to encourage Sun and give thanks and light candles. All the candles were like little sparks of Sun's light and when Sun peeked out from the arms of Mother Night, he saw all those little fires and began to feel warmer and brighter and younger. When the children woke, they climbed a hill, faced East and began to sing to the sun. The sky grew from black to blue to bright and eventually Sun burst forth from Mother Night's arms, all brand new and ready to begin again.

Living here, not just high in the Northern Hemisphere, but in the cloudiest county in the state, I've had to adopt living metaphors to emotionally survive the long winters. It began in 2001, a particularly difficult year. I was taking a long walk when the first small flakes of the season started to fall. I was walking and watching them melt into the packed down dirt beneath my feet and realized that, come spring, all this snow would be melting into the soils, feeding the dormant life beneath and bringing new blossoms. New beginnings. In the still, thick, white of winter, even though we understand the cycles of the season, it's almost impossible to envision the landscape green and buzzing with life. It's a matter of faith and faith, as Ann Lamott puts it, is "just revolutionary patience."

So with those first flakes I cast my prayers. My deepest intentions. I sent them to lie dormant for the winter, trusting that when the Earth started the thaw, something beautiful would rise up where I'd left them. And I've done this now year after year, as a matter of survival. I've had to.
All around this river valley lie my prayers in little hollows, streambeds, compost heaps. Little vibrations of hope and ambition and release.

Going into this darkest night I feel the weight of it in my heart, in the atmosphere, in the hearts of those I love and it takes some strength to be able to just bend with it. To wait it out. I'm collecting my prayers and intentions, waiting to cast them with the first flakes, like gardeners tuck little bulbs into garden beds.