waiting. solstice. patience. hope. longing.

i had forgotten, in the scurry and the rush of the fall, in the urgent need to be getting somewhere else soon...that this year was planned for me as a break, a time to slow down, a time not to rush, a year to practice doing less. how easily i forgot!

in these last few weeks, since my return from the thanksgiving holiday, i began to again create the space to slow down. to be present. to be satisfied with what is. to be here now. to want nothing more than what i have around me. a slow, mindful plodding through life. how good it feels to be grounded again. how much more in touch i feel with my intuition, ability to be honest with myself, ability to gracefully move through the days when i am mindful of every step. it makes moving forward feel right and it makes looking back feel peaceful. how my understanding of my role in this world falls into place.

in remembering why i created this space for myself this year, i've been enjoying my days more. i stop to listen, i allow distraction, i sleep in sometimes! this afternoon, in the kitchen, making backyard fresh french toast, listening to npr...i stopped in the middle of the linoleum to listen. the guest on day-to-day, james carroll talking about his recent op-ed in the boston globe: surviving the dark winter solstice. i was enamored. their banter, the call-in guests, all of it (gasp, even the part about the economy!) wafted gently through the air to settle in all the right places of what i have been thinking of lately. the audio of the segment can be found here, on the npr website.

i can't begin to do justice to the thoughts i the essay. i think they just hit me where i am right now. the juxstaposition of being present and longing for something else. the balance. the interplay. so i'll just highlight his words here.

"...But perhaps darkness is less the source of our anguish than the medium in which it is most painfully felt. Memory and expectation define the days of December - nostalgia for holidays of yore, the letter to Santa - because the past and the future are the unpolluted zones of consciousness. The present is always less than we imagine it could be, and that aspect of awareness most profoundly shapes the human condition.

I began by saying that darkness defines one pole of the psyche. Darkness is not its axis: there is something else. The double-mindedness that insists in the time of long nights that long days are surely coming back is itself the antidote. Humans cannot have the experience that something is missing without supplying it through an unwilled act of imagination. That is why, finally, longing and desire weigh so much more than nostalgia and regret. To want, in the true economy, is already to have. What we know of the light, we learn in the dark."

my favorite thought from the program being that of a caller (from portland!) who was talking about the tide, how we focus on the ebb and the flow, but we forget the moment of stillness when the water is neither coming or going. the edge. i like that thought, especially after a long personal focus on impermanance and the constant change in life. maybe it's a good idea to recognize and feel the silent spaces and the small moments when life stands still.

i will be in charlotte for the solstice on december 21st. practicing holding still and feeling the moment and the love. the darkness that shows us the light!