A Prayer for Light

We gather to pray for the return of the light. Teetering on the thin edge of light, entering fully into the darkness, there is no way out but through. Each year, we wrestle with this unwilled descent into shadow, each alone with it, facing down our individual darknesses.

And yet, we can, and we do, gather to pray for the return of light, for lightness of heart, for the luminescence of a full-throated summer sun, for a light spirit treading lightly in the world.

We cherish and trim our candles, and hold them high in the darkness. In this hearth-keeping, this light-kindling, we feel a long connection with women down through the ages who have worked, mightily, to do the same for the ones they love, and for themselves. And the light does not, did not, illuminate only—no, it throws off warmth as well, to thaw the deep chill and unfreeze the mind.

I wish so fervently to nourish an illuminating, warming life force in myself, to fan it into a bright flame, letting it penetrate all my being and all my doing, and then to project it bravely beyond myself. I pray for the return of the light, in my world and in the world.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse 
from Our Solstice Sampler, December 19, 2013

Thanks for Reading!!

It is hard to believe but we have been keeping up with the Poplar Grove Muse for almost two years now. Many thanks to you, dear reader, for following our various ponderings and poetry as the year has unwrapped.

I'd like to say a special thank-you to our regular team of bloggers: Beth, Rebekah, Mary, and Kim. They write at holidays times, spring break, from vacation sites all over the globe, and with sick kids and ailing parents. I believe I speak for everyone when I say we write because we love to, and self expression in the form of the written word brings us joy and a sense of accomplishment.

I am sad to say that Kim has decided to take some time off as a regular poster to this site. We have enjoyed her writing and wish her well as she works on her own book. Hopefully, she will guest post for us on occasion. If you or someone you know might like to fill in her regular spot for at least a year, please drop me a line at amy@womenwritingbloomington.com.

I have also turned to guest bloggers throughout the year. We have had great guest posts from Catherine, Lauren, Dana, Stacey, Stephanie, and Diana. We can always use an occasional fill in when we get sick or life overtakes us, and we can't complete the assignment for the week. If you can't commit to a regular posting, I hope you will consider being part of the back-up pool. Again, please email me at the above address to indicate your interest.

There are not a lot of rules for posting to our page. Be honest, speak your truth, and celebrate your own unique voice. Many of us are great editors, so there are always people who can give your piece a once over before it is posted.

Thanks again for reading and I look forward to hearing from you.

--Amy for the Poplar Grove Muse

Summer!

Summer is here. Saturday night, a “Full Strawberry Moon,” according to the Farmer’s Almanac: "This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe. In Europe they called it the Rose Moon." Earlier in the week, the Summer Solstice, always a favorite in my household.

The heat and humidity are overpowering. Reluctantly, we retreat into our air-conditioned house, with the thermostat set to a guilty 82 °F. most of the time. We had a cold winter here, for south central Indiana, with six blessed “snow days” extending the school year to a palatable June 1 release. Now, we are having an early, hot summer. The contrasts are stark. (Thoughts of global warming are inescapable, and the BP disaster continues to pump unprecedented quantities of spilled oil into the Gulf of Mexico.)

Every year, I approach summer thinking it will be a blessed contrast to the school year, relaxed, giving rise to a completely different frame of mind for a good 6 weeks. This habitual misapprehension is, in part, a ruse to distract myself from the accrued losses of departing students, friends, and hard-won routine at the end of each academic year. I have always, from a young age, found myself reluctant to move beyond the comfort I have achieved (not always easily), with teachers, classmates, living situations, by the end of the spring semester. 
Having lived my whole life in academic communities (to my utter surprise), I still have not come to terms with this sense of loss, and the corresponding anxiety that accompanies the peeling off each spring of certain friends and acquaintances into other communities, other destinies, distinctly “other” paths of life.

I remember my childhood summers as endless, in a mostly positive way, allowing for a gradual accretion of sameness and satiation of my own direction of my own activities, preparing me to once again subordinate myself to the tutelage of teachers, music instructors, and peers. I miss this sense of vacillation between structure and non-structure. The divisions seem sadly blurred in modern life.

So far, this summer has brought extreme fragmentation, between the various pursuits of my 10- and 14-year-old daughters, the international travel of my husband to various conferences, visits to our aging parents (from whom we have strayed geographically about as far as possible within the continent), and my attempts to hold a work life together.

As I drove my youngest to yet another violin engagement the other day, she commented on how, with the trees all in full leaf, it is almost impossible to imagine how bare and stark they were not long ago. The contrasts are hard to process, yet one has almost to work to not acknowledge them. Indeed.

In celebration of this celestial, if not always as in-the-flesh-as-one-would-like turning of the seasons, I offer companion poems on Winter and Summer Solstice. To help us appreciate the miraculous contrast.

Summer Solstice

My girls, twisted in ropes of sheets,

Toss and turn, long

Twilight

Illuminating thoughts

That usually turn easily

Toward sleep.

They can’t sleep, can’t sleep, cannotsleep.

Nor can the grownups sleep.

Near 3, when I doze at last,

Light streams in again, from the kitchen,

Where my husband, alone, in briefs,

Spoons slow ice cream from the carton.

I retreat to a far corner of the house,

Unconscious for a desperate few hours.

I remember nights

In a white frame house on Center Avenue.

Hearing from my low bed below the windows,

Later, luckier children than I,

Calling out, the clatter of a coffee can

Kicked to end the game,

Jangling buzz of cicadas,

The neighbors’ dog eagerly barking,

My sister’s restless thoughts

From the next bed,

The seductive tinkle of an ice cream bell

One street over.

Let me store up this sleeplessness,

Allow this suffusion of luminescence,

Of hot energy to fill me,

Fuel me, into days and nights

Of oncoming darkness.

WINTER SOLSTICE

These last days draw down

Toward the solstice.

Sun at its lowest slant

Deep in the horizon, the light,

Thin and pale, concentrates

Itself into a few bare hours,

Creates what intensity it can

From scant essentials.

I would do the same. In this season

Of every excess,

We ward off darkness

With gathering and celebration,

As our ancestors

Scattered across the northern landscapes

Hoarded light and company at the table.

Let me, too, cling to essentials:

Breath, life, love.

Let me treasure my treasures:

Faithful partner, children, dog,

That walk in bleak light,

Stripped trees reaching toward

The waning glow,

A warm cup cradled in chill hands.

Soon enough, the turn will come, the days

Incrementally lengthen out to contain

An abundance of brightness and soft fruits,

The easy dilution of slow hours

By darkness outlasted.

Mary, for the Poplar Grove Muse

Twinkle

In the dark and cold of January, I grow more reluctant each year to take down the Christmas tree. Our household long ago yielded to an artificial tree, since we travel most years; theoretically, we could leave it up all year, and we joke about doing it. Mid-month, however, I begin to feel somewhat foolish about leaving it in place, even as I mourn taking it down.

I love the pristine white glow of the lit tree in a dark room, having learned this reverence for light in northern darkness from my own mother, who learned it from hers, whose long-ago mother no doubt brought this love for light from even more northerly Europe. My older daughter and I bask in its halo of light for a few stolen moments each morning before she fades into the bleak chill for an early bus. My husband and I meet in the pool of light before turning in for bed.

Last week, the balance between clinging to the glow and embracing practicality tipped, and I took down the tree. Over the years, I have learned that the tasks of both putting up and dismantling the tree really fall to me, and have come to appreciate both phases of the task as an occasion for mindful meditation: unwinding the lights I bought at 14, which miraculously still work, I honor my small act of preparing for imagined future celebrations; wrapping and unwrapping each ornament made or purchased or gifted, I recall the grade school friend who made a clumsy heart pendant from salt dough, the family friend, now dead, who celebrated the birth of my youngest with a millennium globe, the kindergartner who glued her small photo to a shiny bell. I ponder how spectacular a tree filled with lights must have appeared centuries ago when humans first created this ritual.

It’s all packed away now, and this morning my child and I sat together, companionable in shadows, awaiting the incremental return of light into our days.

Mary for The Poplar Grove Muse