Southcentral Alaska–A four-day weekend of #thanksgiving hibernation in a winter white landscape of powder is long awaited bliss, sparked with learning to use a car battery recharger, and this afternoon, the gift of numb fingers choosing zipstrips to creatively fix and inflate a flat tubeless tire for the yellow wheelbarrow needed to haul wood. There was an air compressor involved. Interspersed is dogtime, writing, sifting, holiday preparation. Snacks.
Molokai Sunrise
I’ve been editing this weekend–mostly my life, though there are some legitimate freelance projects that I’m addressing. One outing took place today, in a fancy loaner truck, to the post office, a mile away. It’s been awhile, and a few books awaited in a pile of mailers, catalogs, and the first holiday cards. Anticipating a delivery from amazon, I deliberately sought the package containing my order of Stars At Night: When Darkness Unfolds As Light, a new book from my friend and spiritual guide, Paula D’Arcy. Sitting at the slab wood dining room table, nibbling a plate of turkey leftovers for dinner, I began to thumb pages, thinking of the times and landscapes we’ve shared the past twelve years: Denver, Alaska, WomenSpeak, and especially time on a Hawaiian island, Molokai.
Page 130 got me. Reverberates, confirming what I now know to be true, in no small measure because of Paula’s gentle guidance for traversing my own dark night. I am so grateful, and curious about the force writing in me now. She writes “Light Moving in the Darkness”:
“It’s not the darkness itself that we must understand. It’s the force behind the darkness and within the darkness… the force moving though life that we must know.
This is the great passage: to see deep into our own nature by meeting its reflection in everything around us. To swim with something very big. To allow the Universe to love us and to love deeply in return…to allow this story to trace itself through the chapters of our life. To live within the miracle.”
As we move closer to the winter solstice, the longest night, in this season of Advent, I will be praying I can be brave enough to #disrupt my own status quo, and give permission to “swim with something very big” – what I name the Spirit of God – and understand and listen to that “force behind the darkness and within the darkness” in order to love and love deeply in return.
Peace be with us.
Photo: Up before first birdsong, greet the sun | Molokai, June 2015