Over the past three weeks, I have been beginning my mornings with the strike of a match and a poetry recitation, thanks to a very dear friend of mine.
“A moment of calm, a single breath, a pause as you being the day,” that is what she invited us to find each morning during the month of December. A month that is usually full and frenzied, a month that takes so much out of us from every direction. As I began to think about how I wanted to start my days, I was drawn to the peacefulness found in the flame of a candle. To words shared by those who see life in such beautiful and mesmerizing ways. When I combined them both, they came out as a brief recording of several different poems that found their way into my heart this month.
Since tomorrow is the Winter Solstice, I decided to share two of the poems I recorded and shared on Instagram, thus far. They are two that I think speak to the darkness we find ourselves in this time of year. How it can hold us and carry us into new beginnings.
If you’d like to listen to the rest of the recordings, you can find them here.
Be well and Happy Solstice,
Gina
Sweet Darkness
by David Whyte
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
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.
from The House of Belonging. Many Rivers Press, 1997.
How Dark the Beginning
by Maggie Smith
All we ever talk about it light-
let there be light, there was light then,
good light - but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize
as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break
over us - as if light were protective,
as if no hearts were flayed,
no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,
the sunrise tell us everything
will be all right. Danger wouldn’t
dare show up now, dragging
its shadows across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
It's been such a joy to see your posts each morning, they've set such a thoughtful tone for the December! Happy Solstice xo