a season of smallness

Christmas is coming. I’m not feeling it. It’s been years since a truly childlike joy has pervaded my experience of Christmas, but this year there is an emptiness that frightens me. A few months ago I wrote about the “experience” of emptiness that I had at Arabia Mountain in June. It was really more of an experience of joy at being opened up. This is not like that. This is scary. There isn’t the whisper of silence to comfort me. The breath, the textures of the silence I’ve known of late aren't exactly those I associate with "true" silence but of a defiant,willful, stubborn wall. It feels alive almost at times. Right now when I write poetry, or try to, I struggle immensely with the words. The tenderness I have felt so strongly for God these past two years is reluctant to help me. Indeed it almost isn’t there. Being in the woods, alone with my camera and notebook, is a way of being with that tenderness. It doesn’t mean I feel it. The closest I do come to feeling it right now is when I’m teaching. Last week my students turned in the poems they wrote. Found poems, like the ones on my blog, and metaphor poems. “this mountain, this fire, this pencil, this song.” The poems shout and murmur with beauty. With the unexpected. Their courage takes my breath away. That is the closest I am coming to praying right now. Reading those and feeling gratitude that I helped birth them. I do say “thank you” many times a day, and I mean it. I don’t think I am angry at God. Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t feel like an explanation for this flatness. I know there is so much grief still there in my heart, mostly for my beloved and complicated mother, who died in 2004, but also for the failure of love. For my inability to love a man as I have wanted to. I don’t seem to be cut out for living into that love. I suppose part of what that’s about is that I am too selfish. But it is also beginning to be about thoughts of the frightening but sometimes compelling possibility of some sort of solitude in a protracted, long-term way. Still, I try to live in the moment, to be present to it, and when I can that is a grace. I wrote something years ago about wanting to be with a man who could “endure my solitude,” as the singer Nanci Griffith put it. I have yet to find this person. And I have put some energy into yearning and search. So possibly that is part of the hollowness this winter.

At any rate, what I do with this wall is what seems to be important. I think it is crucial that I do not pound my fists angrily on it. I can even name it. I have at times called my longing for God, for Christ, for Spirit, into it. I did that tonight driving home down the mountain in the rain. I thought about the cinnamon color of the sky around the browning forest’s top and I loved it. I felt a pang of passionate love for God just watching the rain fall on my pickup truck’s windshield. And then it went away and I began to cry. I found myself wanting the cheer and the abundant spirit of Christmas. The celebratory largesse of it. In truth I don’t want that, though. I suppose I think I should want it. But really what I love on Christmas is silence. Simplicity. Last year I went to the monastery for Christmas Eve and spent the night there. I put my bag down in the little room where I slept and loved its smallness. It felt so right. Little, austere, humble. Almost vulnerable somehow. Christmas felt then like a wreath of simple winter branches unadorned, like the receptivity and yearning of my favorite Christmas carol (actually an Advent song): O come O come Emmanuel. O come, thou Day-spring, come and cheer our spirits by Thine Advent here. I loved Christmas in the slowness of those syllables and of their dance with Advent candles in the secret part of the night. I have felt such resistance to the glitter and pomp of Christmas. For me the time is more about smallness, longing, hunger, emptiness, vulnerability, simplicity. Receptivity. Waiting. The love that has yet to be born, or borne. The child. Incapable of celebration in human terms. Naked, probably, or close to it. Just present in the human world, incarnate, hungry, breathing.

another rediscovered

from 2007

This ravine, still green and furious with foliage, is a kind of gap, its thirty-three descending wooden steps obscured by ferns and moss in October’s unseasonable heat. At the bottom, in the trough near the grotto where I stood with the spiderweb last month and played with light, I once buried my cat Tess, a gray and orange tortoiseshell who loved my mother. I wrapped her in a thinning ancient towel, white with marigolds across it, a brightness I saw the next morning from my deck, knowing I’d made the grave in that hard dark earth too shallow. That unearthing, however it happened, seemed to me then a kind of seamless holy thing, like Annie Dillard’s bloody tom, distributing gore across her waking body at dawn, his compact hunter’s form a tawny stamp of fecundity, much like the flare of vivid yellow I saw in the forest that morning: a flag, brash and empty.

speechless

Almost everything tells
me news of the demolished
always
we craved.
When the speechless hinge
of loss
sings to my invisible
heart,
I surrender and become
its tender plaything.
At home in the story
you left me, I
hide inside the noise
of silence
and slowly start to
hear the praise
breathing in its
ancient room.


©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved

lullaby redux

Despite the lullaby intention set by my mix of chamomile and valerian I can’t go to sleep. Little mice feet sound larger than I hope they are behind my refrigerator and I remember how my brother’s big black dog chewed through the refrigerator coil while he and his family were away. A friend tells me how when he was hiking the Appalachian Trail mice chewed off a big hunk of his long hair and made themselves a nest, there in the shelter while he slept next to a skunk. The skunk may have slept through it too. My cats don’t seem inclined to do anything about these noises. The other morning the tiny corpse of a mouse lay next to Penelope’s fat gray paws in the kitchen and though it hurt my heart to see the creature’s little pink feet still and lifeless I was glad at its smallness. I’ve moved for now into the bedroom where I don’t usually sleep, the one where most of my books are and where an oil painting of sailboats hangs over the bed. My grandmother painted it when I was a little girl, and one of the boats has my name; another has my mother’s and another my aunt’s. I take a big bottle of lemon Pellegrino water to bed with me as well as the cup of herb tea and a book I stopped reading four months ago. The house settles into the almost-winter night and my lonely heart aches a little for my lost love as I fall at last into slumber.