Writing in a short time
2024-12-18
I'm backdating this to 18th December, when I participated in a “Weaving Writers Pop-In Meeting” beautifully hosted by Emmanuelle Chiche The challenge was to write something in ten minutes. Now I really don't write anything in 10 minutes normally! So this was an unusual experience. I let go and let the writing flow into my fingers on the keyboard (others write by hand, I know, but that doesn't work as well for me).
So, here it is, unedited, as a reminder of what I can do if someone else is providing the impetus!
Letting go …
The winter solstice comes at a time before the coldest month, which here in the North is typically January. It is as though we are given a glimpse of the new, returning light to carry us through the most freezing time of the year.
Stillness. The Sun is still: that's what “solstice” means!
For me, the winter solstice is like the new moon, rather than the full moon. The full moon feels parallel to midsummer. A fullness, a fruitfulness, that starts to decline even in its fullest form.
The new moon, however, seems to disappear, challenging our archaic faith in the regularity of the heavens. What makes it reappear, on the other side of the sun, they must have wondered. Did they know that it was still there, just hidden from view by the brightness of the sun? Likewise, were they certain that spring would come again, after most plants had died back?
Do we have the faith to let go – to let things become invisible, dark, still – with the trust that things will come again? But for us it is more than a cycle, it is more like a helix … we let go at one level and come back, reborn, at a new level, on a new plane. The new plane cannot exist in the dimensionality of the old plane. The old plane, with its old dimensions, needs to break down to make space for the new.
So, to me, the cycles of the moon and the seasons both contain truth and are less then the truth. I would like to learn from the cycles, and also learn that for us, the new is always different from old, while being similar. Let us take the opportunity, the stimulus to move on, not to be always repeating old cycles!
see also
I was reminded of the passage in Four Quartets:
… See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.