It is the darkest day of the year, and in church we light the Advent candle for Love.
I am feeling so much love.
Just not the kind I want to, right now.
As my granddaughter says, I have a lot of feelings.
They say you can balance an egg upright on the equinox. If I were an egg, I’d be scrambled. Yesterday was a mad dash to prepare for today’s arrival of our daughter and her family (her husband and two little ones, three and five) and there is nothing I love more than a Christmas house with children in it who believe in magic. Of course, I am not really ready. I threw a lot of stuff into closets and slammed the doors. I still need to scrub the bathtub.
And just now I baked brown sugar brownies and made refrigerator cookie dough.
I planned to wait until the kids got here to bake with them, but now they aren’t coming– today.
They decided not to take the little Solstice ferry from Juneau in rough seas and bitter cold, just in case it turned around, plus it would make the children so sick. They will be on the big ferry early Tuesday morning instead.
This is not a tragedy. I’d hate for the kids to associate a trip to grandma’s with wailing and puking. Still, I already miss them.
At handbell choir practice before church, I also missed every note of the second song, an arrangement of Angels we have Heard on High. When I picked up the B flat bell, I missed my mother, who is never visiting again on an ice-coated ferry like she did when her namesake was born in Haines 41 Februarys ago. Mom is in Woodlawn Cemetery with my dad, grandparents and aunt. She made my sisters and me play the handbells in church when I was young. My bell then is that same B flat I play now. Then, after the service, old Doc Jones ( I think he’s 90?) said it was good to see me and I said it was good to see him too, and he said the same thing he always says, “It’s better to be seen than shown,” and I missed my father so much that I didn’t stay for coffee.
It doesn’t help that Papa Bob died in our house, on the couch, after dinner on Christmas Eve four years ago. (And, no it was most likely a stroke, not my cooking.)
Love comes at Christmastime all wrapped up with both hope ( for peace, a better world)– and memories. And feelings. Lots of feelings.
And don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of bright spots today. Chip said the Davis family brass quintet was “worth the price of admission,” (it’s his running joke about church, which is free )–The light is returning, slowly. Tomorrow will be lighter. This is the way the big old wheel of life is supposed to turn. Dark to light, light to dark. Stars in the black sky. Sunrise, sunset.
There was a poem at the beginning of that solstice meditation, the one I did yesterday, that explains this better than I can. Here it is for you, with love–
Darkness
By Wendell Berry
To go into the darkness with a light, is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
