The Winter Solstice is a time to welcome the returning light. It’s my understanding and experience that to truly do this, we must honor the dark. It is easy, fashionable, and likable to honor the light these days. It seems like more fun. It seems like by doing so, we should have a good time. This isn’t really the case. What I have found, through experience, and listening to the wise words of people and creatures wiser than me, is that by honoring the dark, we allow the light to grow. In our growing, earnest fondness and appreciation of the mystery of the night, we can enter into even greater union with light. This is less about ego, about wanting to be seen as “bright” and “good” and “righteous”, and more about a real relationship with light that is built on a foundation that will not crack when life inevitably upends us. Dear night, I bow to you. Dear light, I welcome you:
I dream I am being chased.
My legs are deep rivers of cold molasses,
veins that run thick and heavy. I want to sprint for my life,
but the weight of my mother
my father
my sister
my kin
hangs dead at my ankles.
I am strapped with flesh, bone, marrow, and blood.
I am a human woman.
This terrifies me.
I can never outrun.
I dream I am being chased.
The hair of my body rises
like ancient antenna.
I am needles on skin.
Everything feels like a final breath.
Shallow, conceding, a bleating plea.
I dream I am being chased
and I want to bow my head to the predator
the way prey sometimes does
in the split second before its life is taken.
Some blood, muscle, bone agreement
acknowledging defeat.
I dream I am being chased
by a frantic, insatiable doom.
A great, hungry nothingness,
a pulsing, rolling tunnel of roaring silence.
It is a space from which no one ever returns.
I dream I am being chased.
I pull the running back into slow motion.
I allow my heavy legs their heaviness.
I allow myself a sinking back into my skin.
I permit my hair to rise and salute the terror.
I turn to swallow the this frantic and insatiable doom,
to make it mine,
to be whole.
I empty into the night, into the dream, and dissolve.
Whoever turns to open her jaws and swallow the night,
learns all the secret names for God.
Whoever turns to flood the chaser with wild, full eyes,
disappears into an ecstasy from which no one has ever returned.
Whoever chooses to meet the frantic with legs of molasses,
can fashion herself a dawn fragrant with colors the world has yet to imagine.
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