Waiting in the Whispering Dark by Sarah Steinke
Today you are offered wise and beautiful insight from Sarah Steinke: poet, mother, graduate student, wife, yoga instructor. These words are a gift to you these halcyon days of Solstice.
"You are a maker. And you have what it takes—whether you make poetry or paper snowflakes, clear clutter or ivy, sing the most haunting music or longing howl, maybe you draw or dance or color or entrain with the ocean, maybe you dig with your hands in the earth, or work at teaching your children that we all are neighbors, even the trees. Whatever draws you nearer to life, do it. It matters. This is poiesis, making something that is not yet. Every time we live out our poiesis, we grow our capacity to listen, to see, to know that wholeness includes and incorporates the dark."
To be awake in the dark is to be alert in a wholly other way. We’ve just passed through the darkest night of the year and anticipate but do not yet know the growing light. This season of night is one of deep vulnerability, where the mind of daily tasks and to-do lists eventually gives way to something more lunar, less solar; here, we find a hush that blankets our daytime sensibilities with something like the acoustics of snow and allows what’s quiet during the day to become loud. This is the only time I hear my husband’s breathing. And I’m reminded that in the dark, we hear what has been with us all along.
Night is also anxious making, fear provoking—we’ve all known nightmares—and what if the ache that's slowed us down and brought us here is bottomless? What if we hear the monsters that since childhood have lurked under the beds, who whisper, "Look at what you’ve done, and there is no forgiveness," or "It's all too broken, and there's no fixing it.”
We’ve all heard these whispers. They come when we’re most vulnerable. But these aren’t the only whispers. There’s something even more true here in the dark.
The Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, in paraphrasing Nietzsche, said people do not like to be alone as they are afraid that something will be whispered in their ears; by contrast, artists wait with fierce attentiveness for that whisper. The truth is, we all are artists, we all are makers. And we all have reasons to doubt this. Partly because we’ve been told in our waking lives by too many people that what we make doesn’t really matter.
This is a lie. And partly because it’s frankly easier to consume rather than create. Because the act of creating calls us to confront our own dread, and our own dreaded hope. But woven into the cloth of our very being is this—we are made to create, no doubt about it.
You are a maker. And you have what it takes—whether you make poetry or paper snowflakes, clear clutter or ivy, sing the most haunting music or longing howl, maybe you draw or dance or color or entrain with the ocean, maybe you dig with your hands in the earth, or work at teaching your children that we all are neighbors, even the trees. Whatever draws you nearer to life, do it. It matters.
This is poiesis, making something that is not yet. Every time we live out our poiesis, we grow our capacity to listen, to see, to know that wholeness includes and incorporates the dark.
Emmanuel. God is with us. Maybe even especially in the dark. Crozier says that every work of art begins and ends with silence. Can we bare the silence? Can we lean into the dark? For it’s here that we see how even the smallest light pierces. Shine.
Wonder resides in places of quickening, those moments where new life is first felt, and where words often fall short. And wonder, for Sarah, is what compels her to stay and listen. And then to enter more fully, senses alert. As a yoga instructor and poet, she finds these are both practices of quickening. She believes the longer we tolerate this place beyond words, the more deft we become to movement—allowing what needs to drop to the ground to drop, and allowing shape to what needs to take shape. Sarah’s yoga and writing practices reflect her commitment to the poetry of the ordinary, and she invites others to awareness and connection, the places of quickening in their own lives.
Sarah’s teaching has had the benefit of much practice—over twenty years of writing and editing experience, and ten years of yoga practice. She is a RYT 200 certified yoga instructor who received her MFA in poetry from UW. She currently teaches yoga classes in a local studio in Silverdale and corporate sessions in Seattle. Her work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crab Creek Review, the Other Journal, the Southern California Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Words Could Not Make It More True, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Find out more about Sarah at her website.
Sarah will be guiding daily yoga sessions on the North Beach of Iona, Scotland for the 2018 Waymarkers Iona Pilgrimage. If you would like to engage your personal poiesis and with a guide who will assist you in listening to your own quickening, register for the Iona Pilgrimage today!
The Light of Lucia
As our waking days get increasingly shorter and darker, our longing for transcendent light increases in tandem. Solstice times hold needs in tension: requisite turn of the wheel of the year towards elements of the next season with what our body's inherently need for wholeness. We are nourished by the dark like the seed who knows to bed down in the dark earth to grow. And yet, even in our knowing of this need, there is always longing for the next season, for the next turn. As we wander into the last week of the darkest time of the year, our desire for light and the nourishment it provides expands with the shadows.
As our waking days get increasingly shorter and darker, our longing for transcendent light increases in tandem. We are nourished by the dark like the seed who knows to bed down in the dark earth to grow. And yet, even in our knowing of this need, there is always longing for the next season, for the next turn. As we wander into the last week of the darkest time of the year, our desire for light and the nourishment it provides expands with the shadows.
Solstice times hold needs in tension: requisite turn of the wheel of the year towards elements of the next season with what our body's inherently need for wholeness within the season we are in.
This day’s deepening darkness is traditionally met with the light and love of Lucia! Today is the Feast of Saint Lucia, or Saint Lucia’s Day, a Christian feast day celebrated on December 13 during Advent. She is a woman of deep symbology in this season: her red sash symbolizing her martyrdom, her white gown a symbol of a white baptismal robe, and her candle-lit wreath-crown shedding both light into the darkness as well as opening up both hands to carry as much food as possible to those in need. Saint Lucia’s Day once coincided with the Winter Solstice; however with the onset of calendar reforms, her feast day has become more likened to a Christian festival of light and one that signals the arrival of Christmastide and the arrival of the turn towards light.
Many years ago, I lived in Sweden, where this feast day is commonly celebrated. The long dark winter I experienced there introduced me to a kind of darkness I had never before known; this was the all-day dark, when twilight hues hang, draped over the day like a blanket attempting to warm against the northern wind that left ice in her wake. My grandfather migrated from Sweden, and while much of his life never was unpacked in America, there were pieces of that culture that came out during the holidays, like items from a curio cabinet. Along with lingonberry sauce and meatballs, there was a wooden figurine of Saint Lucia I remember fingering with quiet childhood curiosity. When I was able to experience the festival in Sweden that year, which consisted of girls and women dressed in robes of white, red ribbons flowing down their sides, baskets of cookies in hand, all aglow from the candle-lit wreath in their hair, it was pure magic.
There was a beautiful reverence in how humanity’s need for nourishment called forth such compassion, such light!
Tonight my daughter, who has longed to participate in this celebration, stated her courage to don the robe and sash, fill a basket with cookies, and take her candle light into the world. She left our home singing into the city night and knocked on neighbor’s doors, bringing the light of her self to the starry-night, to the sidewalk, to the stoop. And no matter the culture or creed, the light is what people respond to! In these dark days, in our corner of the world, people hibernate; it is not uncommon to not see a neighbor for months during the relentless winter cold and rain.
When the much-longed-for-light crosses our threshold to that of another, and a cookie is offered as a gift of nourishment and delight, symbols become activated.
The journey takes on real meaning. The metaphors become embodied. Tonight my daughter participated in a hundreds of year old tradition. There is deep wisdom in holding the tension of the season: the light only shines bright because of the dark, and the basket of cookies is all the sweeter as traditionally this time of year preserves were in ration. This becomes a posture of abundance when the season says the natural world has gone scarce.