Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
I welcome you warmly to this issue of Odd Company. Those of you who have followed these hen scratchings of mine for a while know that the solstices strike special magic in my heart. We are not precisely at the winter solstice yet. It’s still a couple of days away. The exact time of the solstice varies a bit depending on where you are, but the day — December 21 — is the same for everyone. In the Northern Hemisphere, it’s winter solstice; while in the Southern Hemisphere, they’ll be celebrating the arrival of summer. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year; the winter solstice is the shortest. I’m fond of this balance. It reminds me of the traditional symbol of the Tao, interlocking spirals, one dark and the other light. Like light and darkness, each makes it possible to appreciate the other.
The last couple of weeks have been something of a challenge here. My astrologer friend reports a Saturn transit, and adds that Mercury just went retrograde, which “just complicates everything.” Boy howdy, that sounds right.
When you get an organ transplant, they don’t tell you everything ahead of time. They just say, “You’ll be trading one condition for another,” without going into details. We knew the transplant would require drugs to tamp down John’s immune system so he wouldn’t reject the new lung. If we had spent more time talking with other transplant patients, I’m sure we would have heard many tales of common colds that turned into toothy viral dragons, given the juicy opportunity of a person with no defenses. John caught “the sniffles” a couple of weeks ago. Tests revealed that it wasn’t a virus with a name, so there was nothing for it but to rest and drink a lot of tea with honey. After about 10 days, many boxes of Kleenex and much cough medicine, still not fully recovered, he decided to take a short walk, a more risky activity than one would expect. One or two of the immunosuppressant drugs also suppresses muscle cell division, so his legs are weak and shaky and his feet don’t always respond to the helm. Thus he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk, banged himself up in various colorful ways, and ended up needing a CT scan and x-rays. I’m very happy to report that the story ended happily. Nothing major to see here. Two weeks out, we are almost back on track and have a lot to be glad about.
As mentioned above, it’s hard to see anything without both light and darkness. Having experienced a little darkness, we’re extra happy about the light. We have strung our Christmas bulbs, hung a lighted wreath on our door, and bought some poinsettias to spruce up the whole effect. I never tire of holiday lights. They are such a perfect way to celebrate the (literally) darkest time of year. Soon we’ll put up our tree and hang the ornaments we’ve collected during 50 years of marriage. Our son and his wife will come home to spend some time with us, and I will retire my garden shears (temporarily) in favor of baking pans. It’s a pleasing prospect.
We have good friends who host a solstice party about this time of year, and it’s something I always look forward to. There are lots of sweets, people of all ages, a moment of silence while candles are lit, and then the enthusiastic group singing of a dozen carols or so. It’s a wonderful evening. This year, we’ll have to miss it, partly because it’s so easy to catch a bug in a crowded room where people are singing. But we’ll be there in spirit.
Speaking of which, I’ve been listening to a lot of medieval music for the last little while. The solstice always makes me feel kind of wild and well-rooted in nature. It’s not quite Christmas yet, and I am about half animist anyway. There are times when paganism suits me pretty well and this is one of them. I’m particularly fond of this “Solstice Carol,” which has decidedly medieval harmonies. It sounds ancient, though it’s not. It was written by the Canadian folk musician Kim Baryluk (probably in the early 1990s) and is here performed by the a capella group she co-founded, The Wyrd Sisters. I haven’t been able to find anything out about the illustrations, but I do love them.
I’ve been doing my usual wide-ranging reading over the last couple of weeks. Circumstances have not been favorable for the gelling of any big ideas. But I do have a few little ones to offer — my use of the word “little” being open to debate.
I have a little app on my phone called Insight Timer. I use it to time meditation sessions, Tai Chi exercises, and…well…naps. Each day, the Insight Timer powers that be choose a pithy quotation that appears when users open the app. A few days ago they featured this one by the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti:
“There is hope in people, not in society, not in systems, but in you and me.”
This dovetails nicely with a large book I recently finished: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott. Scott divides his time between the Department of Political Science and the Department of Anthropology at Yale. He characterizes himself as “co-Director of the Agrarian Studies Program and a mediocre farmer.” He starts the book with a description of the German government’s plan for “improving the productivity” of German forests in the last century, which involved replacing native forests with neat rows of trees, all the same species. He moves on from there through Big Agriculture to various “planned cities” (Brazilia comes to mind) and then various “planned societies” (like those envisioned by Hitler, Lenin, and Mao Tse Tung). In each case, the grand plans failed because the planners failed to recognize the vast amount of stuff they didn’t know and couldn’t imagine. It’s a cautionary tale. Krishnamurti’s observation seems especially appropriate in this time when so many of us are clamoring for solutions from our governments, our schools, our churches…name the institution. But every human institution is just individual people working together. The quality of the institution always varies with the qualities of the people involved in it. If we want to make the world a better place, we might start by improving our own small selves.
I’ve also been reading David Brooks’ new book, How to Know a Person: the Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. Brooks can be facile, but he is earnest and he’s been steadily working on himself for many years. I’m enjoying this book, and will probably go back and reread it more slowly when I have time. His main message is that it’s possible to learn to become a better friend, a better mentor, and a wiser person. It’s mostly a matter of truly paying attention to others.
And finally, I hugely enjoyed a recent article in Plough Magazine, “The Joy of Mending Jeans,” by Leah Libresco Sargeant. The article is about Grace Russo, a woman who uses the Japanese art of sashiko embroidery for mending clothes. The article is beautifully written. I often think about the lost arts of repair — taking something we’ve used till it has worn out, and making it useful again. Or taking something that is broken, and making it whole again. There is real joy in it. The piece is not long, and it’s well worth reading. It’ll give you a new perspective on our “throw away” culture, and a lot of food for thought.
I’ve resolved to get to bed early tonight, since I caught John’s cold — of course. And there’s an exciting week ahead. I’ll leave you with a poem I wrote on the solstice some years ago. May it brighten a long night for you.
DIFFUSION
How we love a center,
some mighty mass, some star,
to scoop us into orbit
so we know in a bright instant
where we are, what we want,
to bask in its light, its heat,
to belong, with other wanderers
once lost now found,
or some place where lines cross
in a single shared point,
roads intersect and yield
choices, from whence we go out
to seek fortunes, to return
in some new way broken, to try
again and again,
forgetting that every galaxy
swirls around a black hole,
that in defining love
a center diminishes it,
that wise and diffuse
the true heart resides
everywhere at once.
Good to hear John is on the mend! Love the medieval acapella, and although it might not be "classical Christmas music, it's also my fav, solstice - pagan! I did a quick search for you and found the name of the artist who did the cover art, Wendy Andrew. "Wendy Andrew has painted almost all of her life, being encouraged from a very young age by her artist father. She went on to study fine art at Salisbury and Cheltenham College of art. She now lives, paints and dreams in the beautiful land on the Wiltshire/Dorset border of England. Wendy’s work is inspired by the ancient mysteries that are wrapped in the turning of the seasons and the voice of Goddess speaking through the mythical realms. Wendy wrote and illustrated ‘Luna Moon Hare – a magical journey with the Goddess’ in 2008. "