Embracing the Dark

a devotional for late autumn

This year, the start of the liturgical season of Advent begins on November 27th. My original poetry-based devotional, Pilgrim God, is available as a free downloadable PDF on my website HERE!

May it bless your holiday season!

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Thank you for joining us!

Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

On last week’s devotional,

Joseph Deitzer

wrote:

I see a connection b/t the feeding of the birds (that they trust you will feed them) and the pond (that you trust God will fill them). The way we can provide for birds through winter, God provides for us the way he provide water for the pond. Thanks for the post. Great reminder.

What a profound connection—I hadn’t spotted that, and I’m so glad you shared! Thank you, Joseph! Joseph makes more deep connections and shares his spiritual and philosophical insights at his newsletter, Light Reading By Joe. Check it out!

If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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slow down
the whole world
(woods, pond, creatures)
speak in a stage-whisper, 
hoarse and insistent:

slow down

the leaves fall, lazy
the soil wears her finest
and even the busy birds
understand:

there is no hurry
for all is dying. 

this dying is not an ending
but a stop
at a bus station,

a place to sit for a while.

the chipmunk watches me
her cheeks full
of the birdseed
I scattered

and even in her innate busyness
she notes
that I am moving
too fast.  

In our corner of the world, everything is slowing down. We’re in the center of a relative cold snap and yet the days are bright, a sort of Saint Martin’s Summer. The puddles ice over in early morning and melt by noon. The ornamental cherry tree outside the window beside my desk still holds stubbornly to her crimson leaves but the poplars and alders down by the pond undress with abandon, shivering in the frigid wind.

Now that Daylight Saving Time has ended for the year the nights draw in quickly, gloom settling over us around 5pm.

My sense-memories of living city-adjacent are hazy, sometimes, but I do remember the feeling of leaving work well after dark in the fall and winter. Of attending gatherings and functions always at nighttime. I remember nocturnal grocery stores, artificial flourescence, turning all the lights in my basement apartment on to scare away the shadows.

Nowadays, life looks a little different. I used to fight the dark; I don’t, anymore. When it arrives every year, we welcome it. At night we turn on a string of fairy-lights in the living room to illuminate our way through the house. Anything else feels too bright, too garish. I work quickly at my desk in the hour before twilight, hoping to finish before night falls. It feels wrong, somehow, to work after dark anymore. We make soups and breads to scent and purify the house. We hunker in, the woodstove burning steadily.

Romantic? Yes, and no. I am a poet, and I am given to describing things romantically. I do not often describe the dog hair, the piles of laundry, the mail on the countertop, the dishes I should have done yesterday. I do not speak of the normal, the humdrum, the dull.

The trade-off to living a life that embraces the slowness of the season is to live simply. Sparingly, even. Few frills. Few luxuries, as the world might call them. We are privileged to live the way we do. But we also know that we would not be able to live this way if we believed that we wanted to “have it all”.

We have what we have. We have what we are given.

Luxury is quiet. Luxury is safety. Luxury is peace.

I remember the woman I was, who could not slow down when the darkness drew close. I love her, and I embrace her. She could never have known what she would someday become.

Perhaps, if she had slowed down once in a while, she would have caught a glimpse.

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Thank you for reading!

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