Marking The Advent Of A New Season

Looking For The Light In The Dark

I love this time of year. Painful though it may be, the transition from autumn to winter is synonymous with the death of old things played against the hope for new beginnings.

Sunday marked the first of the advent season, an occasion steeped in history and the trappings of holiday rituals.  One of these rituals is an advent wreath.  The concept of a round, evergreen wreath adorned by candles is a tradition intertwined with overt religious meanings and medieval rituals dating back to the 4th century.

     A round wreath and five candles within a never ending circle of evergreen in which the first, single candle symbolizes hope. It is masterful. It is singularly powerful.  It re-ignites a really, deep down gasp of need within my very soul.

     Battered by routine elements of just living these days, then slapped with the commercial tackiness of holiday shopping, I find I want more hope with which to wrap myself from the continual drenching by events in a dark world.  Who hasn't of late felt the hunger for something to feel good about?  

    Turns out the hunger for hope is still just about as great as the desire for love. Literature lauds hope, perhaps, more than anything but love. Wrote Emily Dickinson, "hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all."  

    In other words, it's that little ditty you sing unconsciously at the back of your eyes day in and day out. It's that melody without words that gives you pause and graces your prayer.  

     Given that Dickinson suffered advanced hypertension, severe kidney and kidney stone issues, painful endema (for all of which there was no known treatment at the time), the poet's words  take on a profound meaning.  This is a woman who felt very poorly, if not frightfully so, pretty much all of her life. That she lived to be 56 is testament to hope.

    Manifesting itself as symbolic of hope is the sparrow. I am not surprised. Many times have I spent observing these intrepid tiny birds living hope against hope here in the seasons of the Sanctuary.  They live audaciously, undaunted by whatever Mother Nature seems to throw their way.

    And in all this time in watching these creatures,   I have found I no longer regard hope a subject.  Hope is a verb.  It requires you to conceive, to think, to imagine, to expect.  It's visual. Distinguishable. Perceptible.  One can see it.  

     And everyone talks about it.  Many of my favorite authors in their work thematically incorporate hope ... JRR Tolkien,  JD Salinger, Amy Tan, the Dalai Lama, Barbara Kingsolver.   John Lennon wrote a song about it. Cartoonist Bill Keane drew a strip about it.  Shel Silverstein admonished children with it.  And Anne Frank clung to it against overwhelmingly crushing odds.

    Hope can dim, and like the candle, it can flicker and sputter.  It can be unpredictable. It can die.  Thankfully, hope can bloom again and again, providing that barely imperceptible bit of grace in an inherent belief that situations, people, things can be, will be, better somehow, someway. 

    Hope lights a path for better things, better people to come ... a tad unnerving, slightly exciting and oh so encouraging.  A season of deep introspection, now embodies a time for real heart work. 

    While the season permits me to celebrate what I believe, it also affords me a chance to pry loose those icky, broken and forgotten pieces my inner self has clung to this year.  It is a time for lighting up, routing out what hasn't worked, what is no longer viable, of no real use to me, of letting go.  It is of growth and preparation ... marking the advent of a new season.  

    "Light a candle for the broke and forgotten.  May the season warn their souls. Can we open our hearts to shine through the dark?  Light a candle, light the dark, light the world, light a heart or two.  Light a candle for me, I'll light a candle for you. Oh and in this special time of year, may peace on earth surround us here and teach us there's a better way to live." ... Joel Lindsey.

How Rainy Day Sundays Nourish The Soul

Rainy days are good nourishment for the soul. That is preeminently true for me when that rain comes on a Sunday, when out of habit,  I have learned to quiet my inner self.

I am not much inclined to be out of doors in the rain as autumn exchanges her coat for winter. For much of such a day, I sit and muddle, picking a few good books, here and there to read and rifle through, content and cloaked in a most introspective state of mind. And I am ever thankful for days such as these where, listening to the constant drumming of rain, I can wrap myself in its respite. 

     For the most of my life, Sundays have always been very full of activities, food, people and places.  As a child, I remember mornings spent at a country church, meeting, greeting, inhaling the cloying smell of propane heaters mingled with aftershave, and listening to sermons designed to redress any of the previous week's grievances.  Guarded by massive 100-year-old oaks, in its white, clapboard clutches, stood a glorious porch,  where, if you were fortunate to be on a rainy Sunday, bore witness to verbal accounts of the latest community calamities.  

     Then, too, were the banquets of family foods where aunts, uncles, cousins and kin of all sort gathered to feast on that week's harvest.  You seldom escaped having to eat stuff you didn't like, just feverently praying you were old enough to serve yourself a smaller helping or gift your sibling with the larger of yours.

     All too soon, afternoons of televised football games garnered your attention and, of course, the Sunday newspaper, the weight of a small child, required hours of review and meticulous clipping of coupons. 

     There were some dark times as well.  Those Sundays where kids could romp across two acre-sized front yards, grownups gathered to hear news of war, acknowledging old man Jones' son had died in some forsaken valley called la Drang. In a country few of us could even find on a globe in fifth grade geography class, such rainy Sundays left us with the indelible feeling that life half a world away was not so good.   

     That small church of my youth is gone, a victim of its environment and growth. Football, no longer confined to afternoons, is transformed with near constant cable coverage.  App choice has remodeled the means by which many clip coupons; behemoth Sunday papers aggregating into digital editions with less bulk. Lunch has become a matter of what restaurant at which to meet.  "Just text me!"

      Dark times, though, still exist. Our world, now much smaller in part to technology's reach, intrinsically reminds us that life, now only a few miles away, remains fragile and so elementally precious. Children still die, friends do get sick, jobs are lost, homes get destroyed and some people leave your life, never to return.  The very essence of gratitude can get lost, whittled away amidst the unfairness of it all.

      Yet on this rainy day, a benediction has given my pause 'pause'.   Glorious in nature's technicolor realm has come one incredible rainbow in heartstopping array here in my Sanctuary. My spirit has been provided a much needed time out.  It's my reminder that life offers so much, much more for which to be grateful.

       Yes, my friends ... rainy days do, indeed, they really nourish one's soul.  Happy Thanksgiving 

      

The Unrelenting Allure of Coming Rain

Vivid chroma

There is an unrelenting allure here for the coming rain. Mother Nature, her behavior tantamount to wild horses, heralds an impending crash of glacial temperatures. She warns, "make cover."

When I awoke this morning, there was a rhinocerial heaviness in the atmosphere. My body vibrated, keenly aware of damp cold moving in, that deep down, bone chilling kind of cold I don't like.   Shivering, I rushed back inside to the warmth of my sweet, hot coffee, declarations of oaths falling from my mouth against the encroachment to which Old Man Winter is so now devoted.  Funny, I muse, how our aging physical state actually alerts us to shifts in our climate.

The last few days, this sanctuary has been brimming over with vivid chroma and warming sunlight, brief windows in which to bask in the temperate days of autumn.  Personal walks have been filled with glorious blue skies, punctuated by wispy clouds against backdrops of imperial colors. 

I now find myself bracing for the permutation that will have most of us here hunkering down against the brash, wetness being slung in our faces. The attendant reds and golds, once so vibrant, against that glacial expanse, will fade into indeterminate shades of blacks and browns, reminders that daily life is going to ground, to sleep, to rest, to wait upon the next revival.

That rain, however little or much, will initiate the process of cleaning and removal.  Taking with it bits of the old and dirty until the landscape sits frighteningly barren, a slick canvas upon which father winter will be licensed to employ his artistic visions.  

As a child, I loved the rain. Its clean smell brought a quiet joy to my soul. Grow up along the Gulf Coast, and witness the rain come down in waves, drops arrayed like hoochie coochie dancers, in line after line, cavorting mystically from one end of the bay to the next.

Grow up along that coast, and inevitably you'll come to testify of the gawd awful misery of too much when hurricanes roll through, bringing with them inexplicable acts of annihilation.

Rain. Intrinsically and unrelentingly alluring, its elemental power to nourish requires our genuflection.  Its primordial ability for destruction demands our obeisance.  At its axiomatic core, rain's very essence, heralds change. 

A light breath of wet kisses my cheek. I close my window.  Change, it seems, is here.

Icy Breath of The Coming Dark Season

Shhhhh...that icy breath from the Northwest has blown across my Georgia Sanctuary this morning. It competes at a speed of 15 mph against the waning fall sun, giving life here pause and reason to stay burrowed in its heated cocoon.
Soon, the sun will further retract its warmth, observing from a distance the big sleep Old Man Winter commands here. They speak of colder temps and a greater chance for snow, always something of a rarity here, in the coming months.  Normally, in such forecasts, if seen at all, showers down in January, and on rarest of occasions, early March.   With it comes a silent, still beauty and a rash of accidents by folks unprepared to make their way in it.  Life here virtually stops.
I am so reluctant to light candles against the darkness that comes with this season of bareness.  Such that it is, winter strips away the familiar warmth, clarifying all those things we have held close this year.  Of what is so cherished this year, I do not desire to release.  In this here, this now, as painful as it is, it is the journey of life that calls for the letting go of that which is no longer helpful on this road I find myself. I am mindful of this tenet as the wind cuts across my face.

Thunderstorms, like the one we had here this night, always leave me just a bit breathless for more. Such intensity, the storm's vividness is astonishing to watch, especially to the lone purveyor here that I've become to nature's sometime climatic antics.  I know without a doubt the lush sounds of water trickling off in all directions are both nurturing and destructive.  I can see where vigorous bolts of lightening so illuminating at the time, leave terrible scars upon this landscape.  And I can hear the absolute hush of life as animals, big and small, hasten to find shelter.  These are times in which nature evokes an acute restlessness in me, hence this loquacious sleeplessness on my part.   I was born beneath an earth sign, may be that is why I am so fascinated by such storms. Or perhaps it's because I've weathered my own tumultuous tempests that nature's master acknowledges our kinship.