Listening Into The Silence

Winter began, according to one solstice expert, at 1:08 AM on 22 December. This Midwest winter had a long prologue, with ice storms and snow scribbling its welcome script onto the thin pages of November, spilling ink into the darkening days of December. The humid cold is slow, like fog over the Thames, settling into the dark morning hours, finding its quiet place in the gray days of winter's welcome.

Weeks ago, as I drove across the border from Missouri into Kansas, a line of geese were flying south. Against the dark orange of sunset they appeared as an errant pencil line scrawled onto the light-burnished clouds. They moved like a ribbon of flight caught in the winter wind, pushing the air beneath their wings toward the icy ground, flying somewhere else. Not here.

I find myself again in a place where I don't know where home is, am pierced sometimes with a longing to return that tumbles me like a storm breaker. But return where? To what? Or to Whom? C.S. Lewis's take, in The Problem of Pain "There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else....It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds."

The fierceness of my longings--both of the having and the not-yet-realized--has brought me to my knees of late. This fierceness catches in my throat when I least expect it, and leaves me exposed in the ache of what is, rather than what might have been. And yet I refuse to retreat to a safer version, one that feeds on Prozac, blunted. I will not be numb. My enemy is not my pain, nor my insatiable hunger. It is something else entirely.

Considering Hafiz, in an untitled poem from his book The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz:

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice so tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

***

When I wake up in the middle of the night, my impulse is to look around, to find a way to see. I trust my eyes when they can do nothing for me. An easy metaphor for faith. But how quick my impulse is to reach over and flip the switch on my lamp, to reclaim my vision and therefore to live in a perpetually weakened state of daylight. No, there are things to be discovered when my preferred sense is absent. When home is uncertain. When winter offers days full of tangled branches and short shadows, ice-covered surfaces and sadness. Things are not as they should be. They are as they are.

There's a guy somewhere in Arizona with a tattoo across his chest that reads "Grace grows in the winter." God, I pray he's onto something. In my mind I know that without a winter solstice, there could not be a summer solstice, a day spilling over with sunlight. What feels true and what is, are two different things. Two months have passed since the darkest day of the year, and yet I still find myself living in more shadows than light. The valley of the shadow of death is real. Why do I spend so much time pretending it's not?

From Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I will make the choice to reside in the strangeness of today's fresh grief. And I will listen into the silence: to the call of the geese, to my raw longings, to the pulse of an idling train engine, to the words beneath the words spoken by a stranger. There will always be much to be seen. Yes. But even more to find when this sense fails me. There is much I cannot see today, much I do not understand. I will make the choice to let my imagination feast on this new fare; on a world that I welcome in its harshness, find again to be exciting. I will not run from my aching need, or from the God who resides in the places I fear most. And maybe, in the darkness, beneath the snow, grace is growing. Many things are not clear from where I stand. But being here for now will be enough.