It must be the season, or the year.  This snowless winter I was part of three retreats, one per month, about finding the grace in darkness even while leaning toward the light, about the essential rhythms of descent and renewal which keep our lives and our planet from ending, about the fertile dark as soil for the seeds of hope.  There seems to be a need in these shadowy times to seek the lantern of soul and to hold onto one another while we quest, hands clasped in sacred circles.  During these retreats, we danced in this way in fields in the late afternoon as the sun turned rose and coral and the moon appeared delicately in the lambent sky.

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of … the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself?  ...  One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.  There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.  You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. -- Barry Lopez

As is our annual practice, some of us gathered at the Meditation Shelter in the night of December 31 for a time of quiet, bringing whatever was in our hearts.  Once again we walked through a moon-bathed forest to the Shelter, aglow in candlelight and warmed by the wood stove.  The Shelter has wonderful acoustics, and I was eager to hear the sound of us singing in it.  I had brought a new song, a simple chant from West Africa, that I learned from Michael Meade's new cd A Song Is a Road.  It is called "Azima", and it is a song in praise of the Earth.  But before (and in between) our singing it, I had a few reflections to share.  Below is an adaptation of those thoughts:

The retreat we hold annually during Advent and the days leading up to the winter solstice is named for a gift, one among many, that of story. Planning it, I was drawn to the idea that while in the northern hemisphere the winter solstice marks the beginning of the return of the light, it is the longest night of the year.  I found myself wondering about the gifts of that long night. In times like these, mining the abundant dark is a soulful necessity.

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
--Mary Oliver

At dawn my small dining room window framed a patch of gauzy coral cloud pierced by a morning star.  As I watched, light wafted from the bare treetops and painted the sky silver. Dawn is almost always a welcome turn in the revolving waltz of night and day, dark and light.  For several years I was a teacher of 3-6 year olds in a school that had a Montessori-based program of spiritual development, the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.  Around this time of year, we reflected on the verse from Isaiah, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”  We would gather the children and ask them about their times of light in darkness.  They told of happiness upon waking in the night and seeing the reassuring nightlight on the bureau, or the crack of light where their dad had left the bedroom door ajar.  From infancy, it seems, light has evoked comfort, safety, and joy.

I’ve been taken with a Rilke poem, "Gravity's Law", which begins:

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

I like the idea of gravity as a flow taking hold of  “each thing—each stone, blossom, child”, and pulling us toward something deep and vital. I wonder about the mystery of this; why it is that so often we miss knowing ourselves securely held and carried; and I wonder about the graceful and strong current that connects individual arcs of being to the communal experience of belonging that we so need and long for.

“Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone…”
David Whyte

I heard the first geese a few days ago, flying overhead, their calls to one another heralding autumn, the season of mystery and transformation.   The tupelo trees have been sending out their own bright signals, leaf by ruby leaf.   For weeks until now, the forest has shimmered with glinting green light, without nuance or hint of fall. Perhaps it is the way the late summer sun falls against the trees, which remain full to the brim with green foliage made dense by bountiful rainfall.  A multitude of mushrooms decorate the forest floor: some rosy red, others pale, nodding on delicate stems, still others orange or brown, diminutive or broad.  Wild grasses and plants burst with yellow, magenta, bright blue blossoms; insects sing.  The garden is bursting with growth, and the peach trees and grape arbor lean gracefully, heavy with ripe fruit.

The dark green leaves of the vine-laden, twisted old ash tree are twinkling in the light after the sudden rainstorm.  Beyond it, down by the creek, the ancient willow stump is fat and full with graceful, slender branches rising directly out of the gnarled core.  July at Rolling Ridge has meant an outpouring of untamed green life, driven by capricious skies: nourishing downpours giving way to brilliant sun, and back again.  It’s a changeable season, unpredictable; and that seems of a piece with affairs on all levels of our world right now.  Whereas the rockiness of the wider, political world foments distress and anxiety, the topsy-turvy tumble of rain and light in our small nook of the universe gives rise to exuberant foliage and riotous green life.  The Earth holds it all, the trouble and the joy, but it is hard to find footing.

I'm bringing you this afternoon a little story about what happened in the Rolling Ridge garden on a rainy evening in April.  Rolling Ridge is a haven for wilderness and wild things, a place for Partner Groups to renew themselves in faith and friendship, a cradle for ministry and retreat and study, a laboratory for permaculture. For me, though, its essence has always been the call to live in community, which I believe is the one thing being asked of humanity on every level from the personal to the cosmic in this time. The call to community has a tenacious and essential pull, like gravity, yet, honestly, we do well to look before we leap, for there is real risk in launching forth.  Here is a warning from Adrienne Rich, a poem called “Prospective Immigrants Please Note”:

The rain has played with the clouds and the peeping sun for days.  Sometimes the forest glows lush and golden; then it drips and drips, the earth sucking at our galoshes.  Nothing lasts for long.

Here spring is in full swing.  Outside my window, bluebirds are nesting in the box fastened to the old smoke house.  Brilliant blue and orange, they flash from tree to box, bearing a morsel of caterpillar, or sweet grasses for their nest.  Back and forth they go, slipping again and again through the small, round opening, into the mysterious dark interior and back out again.