The Yogabliss, Two Rivers/RiverTree Yoga on-line Moving into Meditation classes met this morning.  We explored gifts of darkness by “wintering.” Slowing down, resting, shedding skin reveals tenderness. We embraced wholeness by tuning into the darkness and light.  This wholeness makes the living world possible.

We heard Francine Marie Tolf’s Praise of Darkness. This poem speaks to the inner wisdom we hold deep inside – an inner knowing that sometimes surfaces in the dark.

We heard poet farmer Wendell Berry’s poem, To Know Dark.  You can learn more about his life and work from the New Yorker interview, Going Home With Wendell Berry.

We drew inspiration from Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  I learned about Katherine in an On Being interview, How Wintering Replenishes.

We ended with Nathan Spoon’s poem, A Candle in the Night.  Nathan is an ally of the web-site Time Medicine where you can find slow, calm, connect and fast medicines in its “pharmacy.”

Guided Reflection

Here we are together approaching winter solstice – the darkness lifts later and falls earlier until there is a turning – spinning Earth tilts and the light begins returning.  Now we find ourselves in cold and dark. We need darkness to live.  Our bodies calibrate to circadian rhythms enabling us to sleep and wake.  Countless animal bodies depend on darkness to find food and mates. Birds and sea turtles need the balance of natural darkness and light to migrate and find their way.   

What is it like to enter the night naked of artificial light?  How does the world offer itself up to you?   We evolved to live with the vital interplay of darkness and light.  True darkness calls us to surrender our demands and distractions.  We are encouraged to draw close, to look inward.  The edges of separation dim until it’s so much easier to feel our part of Earth, stars, sun and moon.  Poet Francine Marie Tolf offers this Praise of Darkness:

We touch one another
with defter fingers
at night.
Rain sounds different,
its steady falling
a remembered wisdom.
What if the dark waters
waiting to carry us home
slept inside every one of us?
We were loved
before stars existed.
We are older than light.

We can hear the rain’s steady falling as remembered wisdom.  We can sense those deeper waters ready to carry us home.  We can attune to the dark. Our other senses become heightened. We can sense ourselves as part of all: all people, this universe, this breath.   In all is motion, this turning light into dark , day into night, we can remember ourselves as love.

Poet farmer, Wendell Berry says:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

We have been given this life.  In life, where there is darkness, there will be light; where there is light, there will be darkness.  Where there is sorrow, there will be joy; where there is joy there will be sorrow.  In our practice, in our living, we can acknowledge the fullness of things.  We can embrace what it is to be a human in the vast constellation of more than human. Can we offer this embrace with open arms, hearts and minds?  Isn’t it so much like breathing?  We can experience life’s fullness, life’s emptiness by entering the breath more intimately.

Let’s begin by feeling each in-breath waxing and each out-breath waning. Life’s natural rhythm.  You can place one hand over your heart and the other over your belly or simply rest your arms. Feel Body’s rhythmic movement through sensation and currents of subtle energy.   Filling with light and emptying into darkness;  joining in the subtle rhythms of the universe. Can you be curious about when Body next wants the in-breath;  when Body releases the out-breath?  Can you rest in the silent stillness between?  Can you rest in the fertile darkness and allow the seeds of life and love to germinate in their own time?  

Together we are wintering.  Living with increasing darkness.  If we are blessed to be sitting in warm kitchens the world reaches in to remind us that the bitter cold of winter touches each life differently.  We can learn so much from the natural world around us.  In her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May writes:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Even in these days of darkness we hold the possibility for change and growth.  We can listen deeply to our inner songs. We can seek inner visions. We can keep our astonishment and wonder alive. And we can express our reverence for life by moving heartfully, mindfully through our days.   It is time for reflection.  As everything continues moving around us, we must be still.  Winter helps us still.

Take a moment now to tune in to your inner darkness.  Sense it as vividly as you can.  Feel it in your body.  See it in you mind’s eye.  You might find it difficult to see dark without the help of light. The moon is our constant companion.  Her journeys can be our teacher.  We see the whole of the moon in the ever changing cycles of darkness and light.  Tune into your inner light knowing it is revealed with the help of darkness.  

We are opening to the gifts of stillness. We are wintering:  slowing down, resting, shedding skin and revealing tenderness. In his poem, A Candle in the Night, Nathan Spoon reminds us:

Stone is tender
to lichen.
Lichen is tender
to the earth and its other
inhabitants. What are
you and I tender to?
When a black hole
swallows a star,
it must do so
tenderly, since
a universe hinges
on tenderness.
At midnight
your candle burns
with tenderness,
dream-like in an amber
votive, its flame
flickering tenderly.

What are you and I tender to?  In our practice we open to what is revealed in the interplay of shadows and light.  This is the place where our questions are illuminated as the whole universe hinges on our tenderness.