There are things about this time of year that I love. The way the days shrink back into themselves like a small mole retreating into the refuge of darkness, the way the dark creeps up earlier each evening inviting us, as if to a banquet of respite. The way we are encouraged (especially if we live in a place where winter solstice does indeed fall during the winter season), to snuggle in closer to the lives we have. And the way we can track light’s daily diminishment, till magically generously and unfailingly, on Dec the 21st. it reverses.
Then we get to watch the light stretch ever longer across the ground of our every day.
But before that happens, there is this pause, like the pause between breaths, this nano moment when the world stills, like a slack tide, between the coming in and the moving out, like the transition in a birth between the opening up and the pushing out, there is a quietude, a gap, between the connection with others and the soft drop inside of self.
I feel very fortunate when I spend these days with family and friends. The joy of connecting, the food, laughter, the closeness with other. I am equally fortunate when I get to spend these days without family and friends. Then there is just the ‘us’ of it all. My husband, our sweet canine, Duffy, and myself, as will be the case this year, fire, the books that have piled up unread while I have been writing my own, co-cooking, the sweetness of another day.
Thomas, my hubby, is an avid reader, as those of you who follow these writings already know. He reads non-fiction just as faithfully as I read literature and fiction. But I get the benefit of his study, as he generously provides me with the ‘cliff notes’.
Today while sharing a cuppa, delicious hot black after lunch tea, he said casually to me, “How odd is it to imagine that we may be the last generation to live before the collapse?” I know he had just completed Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp, one of many current books outlining various grim iterations of our planetary future. Luke Kemp is a senior researcher for the Center for Existential Risk at Cambridge University in England. He outlines with the precision of a surgeon, the many forces coalescing on our planet that indicate the possibility of our imminent demise. Whether that means all of us or most of us, whether immanent means soon or less soon, this world, this planet, as we have known it is folding up shop, pulling up the circus tent, or maybe collapsing the tent because the show, as we have known it, is shutting down.
Call it AI, possible nuclear wars, droughts, fires, tornadoes, call it floods, famines, social unrest, civil wars, authoritarianism, call it income inequality, pandemics, call it by whatever name you wish or call it a hybrid name, a conglomerate name, a mixture of all the forces that are baring down upon us, because, they are all bearing down upon us. All of them, either operative or all cocked and ready to roll, just waiting in the wings for the right cue which our leaders are competing to be the first to call out.
I understand and feel great sympatico with those who fled or are fleeing this country for all that it is becoming. For the longest times, I too created plans and plots to do likewise. Now, instead I am settling into these dark days with a deeper sense that what is befalling one is befalling all. Maybe not at the exact same time or in the exact same way, in the exact place, but we are all too connected for any of us to live in ‘safety’ when ‘safety’ in any ultimate sense is precisely what no longer appears to be on the menu.
There have been many pained years when I was in low level grief and anxiety over who we are, why we are as we are, and uncomprehendingly upset over the fact that we, as a species, have not found our way to realizing what Eden we are living on and in, and therefore have not spent more unified consolidating efforts to preserve and prevail. But we have not, and we seem incapable to doing so. That being the case, given who we humans actually are (rather than whom we might be, if we were better, more evolved, or more mature as a species), we are facing int and negotiating the many forces that will act, interact and co-act to put us and the planet into impossibility or multitudinous variations of non-viability.
So yes, those of us who have lived long and are slated to die (if we die naturally) in the next 10-15 years, may well be the last generation, at least in the West, to have known such abundance and relative peace in the garden of Eden.
There was a time when all I wanted for Christmas, for my birthday or for Chanukah was to experience gratitude because I suspected I would be lighter of heart if that was actually part of my lived experience. I understood the sentiment, knew that the circumstances of my life warranted gratitude, but I couldn’t connect with it as truly my own. It felt fleeting, like a shape in the clouds that I reached up to hold, even as it drifted away or reformed, transformed into something else.
Through a set of fortuitous circumstances, some sought and some graced, this unexpected gift of gratitude has recently become a true beat of my lived days and nights. Let me clarify what I mean by gratitude since, like so many well-worn words, it means different things to different people, even as we assume otherwise. For me, gratitude is the appreciation, thankfulness for things as they are, rather than the rather constant argument and negotiation with reality to make it more of what I might prefer. This newly minted gift has allowed me to better savor, love, the goodness that still is, rather than being predominately scared about losing it, because loose we will, from death of self or beloveds, or from the breaking down of the world as we have known it.
Opening to the experience of gratitude does not, for me, harbor undue false notions of hope, that we will make it through unscathed by loss, both personal and collective, because everything I have seen, lived, observed or learnt, suggests to me that we will not.
Pre-mourning our future losses will not make those losses more tolerable, although for many years I thought it would lessen the pain if I practiced ahead of time. Now I feel almost the opposite of that. That filling our lungs with fresh air and our hearts with kindness and joy may be the best medicine, our greatest asset, moving forward to face hard or painful times.
This solstice, I choose gratitude for all that still is, the roof that keeps us dry, the walls that keep warmth in, the water that flows from each tap, the warm air that pumps from the heaters throughout the house and the tremendous beauty and intelligence that pulses in the natural world which includes us, and love, which bonds and binds and gives us a chance of belonging more fully to ourselves and this world.
As an elder, it is incumbent upon me to find ways to live fully, meaningfully, gratefully, without anticipating an unlimited or positive future. That is indeed the only truly relevant lesson of this season of life, the autumn and winter of our lives, when we are asked to remember, or return as we did when we were children, to the joy of living this day, and the next, fully, in wonder.
But I suspect, that across the age spectrum, we are all needing to learn some version of this, especially the younger amongst us who have the heaviest lift in that department as many, not all (as is evident by the higher suicide rate of younger people), are adapting to that hard task with the brilliance and versatility that youth has the capacity to bestow. Maybe we can learn together, the elders and the younger ones, we can recreate what it means to live fully, gratefully, lovingly, even when the future is uncertain or maybe even doomed, and safety is an illusion whose comfort is wearing thin.
There was a scene in the movie, “Don’t Look Up”, the last scene, when the family and friends join hands while sharing their last meal lovingly, joyously, even as the comet is about to obliterate them all.
Many elders (not all) are at ease, gratefully dancing on the decks even knowing that the ship is doing down, their glee in the dance still abundantly evident. It’s not denial, it’s a choice, is it not? A choice! Do we lean into ‘future uncertainty’ clutching our terrors as if they are life rafts, or feel gratitude for all that still is; life, love, each other and the dance that does not stop, even when we do.
This solstice I choose gratitude, for the dark days and light’s eventual return.
every morning since
our longest night
i watch with hunger
the shy inch worm
of returning light
delight.
