Figuring Out Life While Aging
The sullen morning light, the cloudy afternoons, the grey-whites of salted roads and dirty snow piles. The holiday lights removed, the newscaster’s COVID numbers, fogged glasses above serious masks, and black-coated distancing. I huddle indoors remembering summer’s colours and pre-COVID times, I am grateful for hope and my flowering window plants.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke – The Waking
I have learned to walk without a destination, except movement, grateful for the places unfurling before me. Where the twisting path ends, where I have gone my distance, is carefully limited now. I rest briefly then rise and continue alert for random beauty, walking forward till the destination we all encounter halts me.
The winter solstice wakes in grey light outlining the old pine. I step into red shoes, ready to froth and jitter preparing for the feast. The light reveals the snow-edged road. as rushing gatherers, masked and crowded, hurry towards Bethlehem. The dark lurks, in its shortening time, waiting with its unsought balm of a pause, and sleep.
The Crone at Home I rise when the light beyond my eyelids beckons. In golden earrings, silk, linen, and dancing shoes, I feast on porridge and berries. I turn to my scrying glass to see the heart-breaks of the world. I climb to my tower, grasp the treasured fleeces I have been given, and earned, and use my wheel to spin my thread - weft for my tiny moment in the infinite tapestry. Fingers red from spinning, I descend, leaving my tower, throwing my muddiness into the creek, my restlessness into the lake. I return Wand calm. In my caldron I conjure up a bubbling broth - an evening potent potion and comforting charm. By candlelight, I spell myself into quietude. After, I open my mind to divining crystal stories of others. At the witching hour, I wrap myself in my feather bed and dream.
A re-post of a poem I wrote a few years ago.
Midwinter is a time of darkness, a time when the light lessens and disappears, a time when we mix hope and fear. The worldly powers shape most, but not every detail of our lives. We can, as this Christian story suggests, as Mary might have experienced it, face our lives with faith, with belief that out of our struggles, meaning will emerge.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” – Matthew 2:15
by Joan Vinall-Cox
It was a dark time –
Mary had wanted to be glad
Joseph had chosen her
but that strange dream …
and old Elizabeth, swollen with child,
calling her blessed, saying a
Child was growing in her
too, yet she’d never…
except in that strange dream;
and she had swollen
and Joseph,
angry and sad and puzzled,
had planned to hide
her disgrace, but he dreamed
too,
and married her but slept
apart
and would not look at her.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time –
the rulers had decided
to count them all where
their ancestors had lived
so Joseph and Mary must walk
for days, weeks, and her so
large and tired, and both so
puzzled and hopeful and fearful.
Could the Holy One really have chosen
them?
Still they must walk,
as the rulers
demanded, in the cold,
in the darkening time, they must
walk into Bethlehem, this ancient
town, filled with others obeying
the rulers who wanted to count them and did not care
about walking, or a room for a
young woman with her time
pressing on her,
with the Holy One’s Gift demanding
His time on earth,
and no room for this family
It was a dark time.
There was light at His birth –
light in Mary’s eyes and
light in Joseph’s smile and
light flowing out, pulsing out
around the wondrous Child
light that brought the amazed
shepherds,
and star light that
brought the Wise Ones from
afar to worship
Him
and light that the eyes in
the dark could see, whispering to
a man with too much power
that he was nothing
beside such Light,
and the Holy One sent another
dream to guard the Light, to
hide it in a foreign land
and Mary and Joseph fled
into Egypt, carrying the Light
away from the darkness of
Herod’s massacre of babies.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time –
waiting in a foreign land,
watching Him grow, and learning
patience and trust, waiting
for a new dream, yearning for
home
and then
out of the dark time,
the dream came.
When does time begin? September school or Midnight at New Years? Rosh Hashanah or Chinese New Year or Hijri? Or Easter With Basho’s “song in the heart while planting” or Oliver’s wild geese honking northward? When the ovum engulfs the jetting sperm or When the head crowns or when the cord Is cut? When does TIME begin? With the diagnosis or sentence or the narrowing horizon of age or the forever of following the hearse to a grave? When I awoke with a poem pounding through me? or when your eye kisses these words?
The days are comfortable while the night closes in. I walk in sun-blind mornings with crippling feet and a dizzy mind. I close the blinds against the approaching dark and remind myself to count our remaining blessings as autumn provides rich colours.
What remains of my parents is buried within my subconscious, opened by random impulses and photos shared by algorithms in memory programs. What remains of my parents is buried in a deserted graveyard, silent except for the gravestones, close to my mother’s girlhood place . And far away.
An Old Friend’s Gift Reminiscing through the weights of time releases mysteries: diverging paths shadow memories of collective beginnings leading to splintered destinations.
– Margaret Atwood
Old woman in a blue dress stands in the sun, Stares at her grandmother’s old home And the ancient ferns, Wonders what it will be like to follow her.
Learning Living 