“The Long Hard Labors of Prose and Enduring Love”

(Two weeks ago I assigned my writing group the task of using a phrase from this poem as an entrance into their writing piece. What follows is my contribution.)

The New Story of Your Life – by Michael Blumenthal

Say you finally invented a new story

of your life.  It is not the story of your defeat

or of your impotence and powerlessness

before the large forces of wind and accident.

It is not the sad story of your mother’s death

or of your abandoned childhood.  It is not,

even, a story that will win you the deep

initial sympathies of the benevolent goddesses

or the care of the generous, but it is a story

that requires of you a large thrust

into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude

entirely your own.  Whatever the story is,

it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes

in it, gardens that need to be planted,

skills sown, the long hard labors

of prose and enduring love.  Deep down

in some long-encumbered self,

it is the story you have been writing

all of your life, where no Calypso holds you

against your own willfulness,

where there are no longer dark caves

for you to be imprisoned in,

where you can rise

from the bleak island of your old story

and tread your way home.

There was a point in my forties when a shift happened in my view of my life. I no longer looked forward to a disappearing horizon toward which my life moved, but began to look back from a finite edge. It was then I began to know that I didn’t have all the time in the world to do what ever it was I imagined I might do with my life. Only later, as I began the long hard labors of learning my own story, looking back and back again and again, turning over the stones of the past, peeling off the dirty bandaids that had concealed old cuts and bruises to see what needed attention, healing, opening doors to shadowy rooms long locked, only then did the whole of my attention look backward in time. When we do this work of excavating our past the work can be consuming, painful, necessary. It is basement work, clearing the depths of ourselves, reading the old letters stuffed in dusty boxes, gazing at black and white snap shots of ourselves in little dresses looking out at our grown up self with hollow or happy eyes. It can be fascinating even as it is painful, this archeology of our lives. And it can take years. I know a woman who was abused multiple times thru her childhood. She has been in therapy for 20 years in order to heal from the woundings. The work still consumes her as she nears 60. It could be that for some people, this is the life work. The healing of a torn soul can take a lifetime.

There have been times in my life that I harbored the belief that if I got “it right”, the big IT, meaning Life or God or Mystery or Myself, then my days would unfold sweetly and easily, moving like clear water over bright stones, or opening like the petals of a scented blossom. If I could just get this piece, or this piece or that in place then it would all flow as tho I held in some secret place the key that would release all the beauty and creativity and peacefulness and holiness and wisdom that would characterize my life. I could stop trudging. I could stop having to go back and deal with old issues from the Old Story, the deeply ingrained habits of thought that keep me in fear or inhibit relationship or block a full, rich sense of this person I’m maybe meant to be. But the poet here speaks of something else required in the “new story”, the new vision of who I am called to be or what the narrative of my lfie will contain. It takes work, he says. The days I write collect meaning, one word at a time. It isn’t always poetry. It isn’t a fluid, metaphoric sweep of life, but a prosaic step by step journey thru time. It is slower, more benedictine, more tree-like. Tree like. . . Once recently I found the phrase “the benedictine trees” after a flash of insight into the vow of stability trees take. How they live in community, rooted, surrendered to the weathers of place and time. How they commit to their community spreading roots out underground thru the seasons of growing, moon by new moon, reaching to entangle themselves with the roots of their fellow trees. How they hold each other in being. The Enduring Love trees practice for each other. The Labor of their Prose, seasons of root and leaf and seed, the long silence of sap flowing, the phloem and xylem moving water up and down the trunk thru the months of sunlight until it all sinks again into the root and rests, enduring the cold of winters.

Saturday it snowed in the Tetons. It began with rain on Friday afternoon and it rained all night. Then in the morning the soft hail, the ice, the snow. It snowed cold and wet all day in and out of sun. There could have been rainbows against the white peaks as the wind blew the snow across the watery sunlight. Sometime in the afternoon I sat for a long time under a massive Douglass Fir with boughs that curved down at the base forming a sheltering room. There I created a small ceremony of gratitude for the Enduring Love of this old forest, this place that again and again has brought me to tears for the shear beauty, the dense, tumbled stillness, the faithfulness. The trees of this forest are fir and spruce, pine, aspen and hawthorn. I sense in my own heart a tenderness for the risk of our forests. So conscious of the damage we humans do in our taking and taking of the earth’s resources. And How faithful the trees are as they continue in their work in spite of us. They don’t give up making trees because of human violence to them. They simply continue their own labors of prose and enduring love. This tumbled forest is full of fallen trees and small pines and firs and spruce growing up amid the decomposing bodies of their ancestors. I spoke to the trees in such small words, such fleeting human sensibilities, in tears wondering again at the depth of emotion that gets stirred in me there. Once I looked up thru the branches that disappeared hundred or more feet above me into the blue, snow dusted sky and I saw tears. Oozing from the bark of the huge trunk were small glistening drops like tears. Sap dripping, frozen. I reached up and picked a piece that immediately softened in my fingers, became sticky. I picked another and put it on my tongue. I could taste the sharp, pine flavor as it melted in my mouth. I pulled a strand of my own hair and wedged it into the plates of bark, an exchange that felt like communion.

I read there is a spruce in the mountains of Sweden known as Old Tjikko that is 9550 years old. The root is 9550 years old. For thousands of years it was a dwarfed, gnarl of a tree, barely a stunted shrub. The visible trunk only a few hundred years old. Then in the last century, with global warming it has begun to grow and leaf and make cones and take on the recognizable shape of a tree again. Imagine the vow this tree took. Imagine the labors of enduring prose in a life this long. Imagine the sap held with such love in that ancient root.

On Sunday the Wyoming forest was utterly still. It is always a silent place but it seemed especially quiet that day. Not a whisper of traffic sound from the highway. No wind. Not a bird or bugling elk. No wandering herds under the trees. No bear shuffling thru the fallen aspen leaves nibbling the hawthorn berries. Everything held in bright, cold silence. Winter coming on.  Not far off the sound of the Snake River flowing over the stones. It won’t be long before even that is stilled in ice.

Home again my life is caught up in the rush of days and work and people. I come home with a promise to slow down, to listen more, to be more still. The trees teach such slowing, such stilling that the traffic of urban life can quickly shatter. The new story of my life must be about an acceptance of the labor of prose, word by word the days are imagined and told. The new story must be about the labor of enduring love, the benedictine vow to cherish the community of souls life has given me. This is a large work demanding the most open heart. Presence, where the old story and the future story come into meaning in the work of the moment. No promise that all will flow easy and golden when I get it right. It is the labor itself that makes the love and makes the endurance possible. To labor out of love for the sake of Love, this is the prose. This is the poem.

wrensong, 10/28/09

Old Tjikko

Dreaming Among the Trees

In the deep heart of an old-growth pine forest in Northern Ontario known as Temagame I slept at the base of an old Red Pine who dreamed herself into me and called me to my depths. I saw in the night a portal in the roots leading down, inviting me to travel deep. The dream said “The way forward in your life is thru your own depths”.

Years passed, and one August day I wandered in the tangled forest of northern Wyoming at the foot of the Teton Range. Again Tree came to me in a dream showing me the great roots, enormous roots of a primeval Tree. The dream said: This is the Tree where all the Apples grew. From this enigmatic pronouncement I felt a knowing that here was the One Tree, the World Tree, the Tree from the beginning of time. The Roots of this tree are dense and dark as stone, ancient. They hold the source of everything in their web.

This week I travel again to that forest of Douglas fir, Engleman spruce and aspen and river willow where the Snake River braids itself south from Yellowstone thru the Gros Ventre valley. I go wandering in the dream world of tree-life along the trails with migrating elk, watching for mule deer, moose and the late bear. One day there will be my birthday. When I was there two years ago the full moon rose on the night of my birthday and the coyotes came in a pack howling around my cabin in a great, happy rucous before dashing off into the dark forest. The trees there are dense and patient, close. A cloak of something long and old wraps around me when I move among them. There are bones hidden at the roots. There are a million stones along the river. At dawn the peaks glow pink to the west. I return with offerings. I go listening for dreams.

wrensong

Medicine Bundle

Out in the quiet evening of the Ozark hills, the mist gathered up the path first in the west, then the south as the night fell and the stars began to shine thru the moist sky. It hovered over the low scrub of late summer grasses and trees as tho called toward the Web we laid out in the circle of grass, the voice of prayer we raised for the healing of Things. We walked back in the dark thru thick clouds and spider webs over wet earth. In the morning the sun cast rose-tinted light all over the barn and the meadow where one leg of a rainbow rose up from the mist off Crooked Creek. There was the promise of rain in the air. The promise of Autumn. The promise of good Journeys.

“Wait for what comes”…the wisdom of the Drum whispered. “Wait for what is given”…

In the weeks before, as summer was ending, I had journeyed the mountains and high deserts of northern New Mexico with my sweet Jim. We wandered up rushing streams past daisy-strewn meadows and Aspen groves touched with just a hint of gold. We let mountain blue birds lead us along grass trails thru volanic valleys, and chipmunks ate from our hands in the rain. We hunted agate flints up Cerro Pedernal, obsidian from the Valles Caldera, fallen pinon branches along gravel roads, and chunks of lustrous pink lepidolite left behind at an old mine. We hiked down steep miles thru silent, sun-drenched ponderosa forests to hot springs spilling out of the mountain, tumbling into deep pools where wild flowers grew and small fish and bronze colored dragonflies sipped the blooms. There we soaked in the healing waters listening to the wind in the pines and the nameless forest birds. We followed dirt roads deep into the Jemez Mountains searching for the ruins of an ancient pueblo where we found mounds of stone rubble and the forest floor covered with potsherds and obsidian chips. The next day, after the rain washed every arroyo with floods of red earth, out in the wide expanse of Chaco Canyon, we camped under the cliff where a thousand years ago ancient peoples, who listened to the Land better than we do, who watched the seasons and the stars, built staggering ceremonial houses out of sandstone and mud. Where they laid mysterious roads, spirals and Sun Daggers to the shifting seasons. Where the people still come at the Solstice to dance the old dances, pound their feet on the earth where the ancesters danced. Where even this visitor could feel the rhythms of it rising into her feet. There the skies spread out at night white with stars, the blaze of our Milky Way stretching horizon to horizon, galaxies spinning, here and there the cast-off shards of a meteor tumbling thru space.

There were precious gifts received along these days of travel in beautiful places that I put in my Bag of sacred things. There were things given. As is the way of it, some things were lost.

Sunday morning, at the center of the web in the center of the meadow, we dug a hole under the place of the night’s fire and buried a “Crane Bag”, the Celtic Medicine Bundle, full of gifts to Cailleach, to the Weavers, to Earth. In the bag we put our small offerings along with stones each of us brought from our home ground, with simple drawings and heartfelt intentions to honor the Land with wiser eyes and deeper attention. We added shards from Pat’s lightening-blasted oak up the ridge, the bleached white bones of the Copperhead Carol had brought. We drummed and raised a chant for the healing of the torn places on the Web, the injured places of Earth, the terrible insult we humans can’t seem to help giving to the Sacred Wildness of Being. We packed our things, crossed the clear water of Crooked Creek and came home.

Now, Autumn blows into Missouri with cool, dry days and sun. Leaves beginning to scatter. Gardens growing weary. Our pumpkins are fat and yellow. Big red peppers dangle from green stems. Late summer tomatoes still green on the vine. Now, as the year winds down, moving into the darker season, I find as I do every year the felt sense of a new year beginning. This year something new coming, Something shiftiing. The felt need for new spaciousness in house and heart, renewed intention to tend well the sacred things, the delicate, fierce web we travel. Today it feels Mysterious, a true Fool’s Journey into mist-shrouded pathways, following the ancient circuits of the seasons. I wonder what needs packing for this Journey? What needs leaving? What will be lost along the way? And what will be given?

It may start with a stone

On the ground that draws

Your eye and then your hand.

Holding it, you feel better.

It reminds you of something.

In the room of the heart

Where your soul sits

Hangs a sacred object

That is part of who you are

And why you are here.

-From Medicine Bundle By Chris Hoffman

wrensong, 9/29/09

The New Story

It’s feeling like the day to begin the new story…prayers whispered, tears shared. There were fisherfolk by the lake, ducks, an overcast sky, the patient trees. She read the letter of the broken heart as I listened, gazing over the still water, tears, the salt offerings for the healing of hurts long held. In our silence the Night Heron flew from the pines over the water on those wide still wings and came to rest on a bare branch just over our heads. In time we spoke in low voices telling him of his beauty, the gift of his presence. We spoke of ceremonies with fire and boats and wind; ceremonies of amend and release for the old, old pain. The quiet bird bore silent witness then turned and lifted onto the quiet air and soared off to the other side of the lake. In time, we, too, rose and walked away across the wet grass and went to our separate days.

There have been in recent weeks conversations about living into our new stories. Not the story of our past selves, old wounds, the nets of failure or even success… But the new destiny we imagine and then wake to one day, rise up and tread our way forward into. The new story of courage and right-relationship with …what?…Life, living in our own clean integrity, humility, humor, impeccable grace. Knowing every day somehow that the Sacred dwells in all things, that not only Night Herons, even the stones are alive with it, and every day is worthy of our full attention, every day a ceremony offered to the winds, the water, Earth and Time, the wild-fire of this moment, the fierce, sweet prayers of our hearts, the risk of joy, the labors of enduring love.

Say you finally invented a new story of your life. . .

. . .it is a story

that requires of you a large thrust

into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude

entirely your own.  Whatever the story is,

it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes

in it, gardens that need to be planted,

skills sown, the long hard labors

of prose and enduring love.  Deep down

in some long-encumbered self,

it is the story you have been writing

all of your life. . .

-a portion from “The New Story of Your Life” by Michael Blumenthal

Tracings Along the Veil

Yesterday morning she was in the trap at the back of the yard. Trapper John is convinced this is Mama. She listened passively as I spoke quietly to her. I apologized. Once she blinked at me slowly as if to say, “I know. I understand”. My wish. Yet, she knows me. She knows my smell, the rooms of my house, the ways I come and go, the food I serve. I have inexplicably betrayed a friendship she cautiously presumed at my door. Yet she suffers it all without seeming rancor. There  is in our shared gaze no common language. Only we have eaten at the same table, crossed the same threshold, followed one another’s shadows along the Veil between our worlds. It makes for relationship.  I take some relief but no joy in her capture. I pray for a friendly wildness where she might live out her raccoon days in peace. I pray the thriving of her offspring.

This morning a Peregrine Falcon dived out of tree in my yard scattering gray feathers from a fleeing dove. The predator perched for a long moment on my deck rail before taking to the high trees.

wrensong

Small Lament at Dawn

Mama, where are you?

Mama, who was always close,

Mama, whose belly smells of thick life,

who always kept me safe. . .

Mama, I am so afraid.

Where are you?            Mama. . .

Mama. . .

What am I to do?             How

will I know how to be Raccoon

without you?                        Mama. . .

My small heart is breaking. . .

Mama. . .

wrensong, 8/12

Fierce Fire

I’ve been thinking about death. I’ve been dancing between the Fearful and the Fierce.  I’ve been making things with the white bones of trees, washed in the wide waters of Lake Michigan, buried in sand. I burn images of mythic birds into the smooth skin of old wood. We have been talking about the alchemy of Fire. A writer friend quotes Galway Kinnell “On some hill of despair the bonfire you kindle can light the great sky…”. She ponders her artwork, the fuel in a small ceremonial pouch, the soul longing for fire. The ego is terrified of dying. It seems we must at some point in the ponderous journey of life come to some conversation with our Death. The poets have always said so. Its about freedom from the clutch of ancient fears, regrets, the toxic nests of rancor, pruning old wounds. Those dark birds fly in and out from the dark branches.

A friend was working in the Badlands of South Dakota last week where he has worked studying paleo fossil beds for the last seven years. Roaming the extreme landscape in the heat of summer, pitting himself against the stone and the wild silence. He is a big man with a robust intelligence, a love for the rock and deep time, a quick and easy humor. The last day there a wind cought him and tossed him into a crevasse sixty feet below the trail. It took five hours to rescue him. He has multiple fractures but he is alive and laughing.

I was thinking about how this anxious ego of mine has me walking well away from the rim of canyons. This Fearful one wants to save my bones.  The risk can be anything you want to name, the edge we walk in our lives: the terrors of loss of comfort or security or approval or health or loved ones or time or sense of ourselves, of God. This, the Fierce Ones tell us, is an illusion. We are all on the rim all the time. Right up at the edge where a sudden gust can catch us at any moment. We had better talk to the wind, the abyss. It is one step away.

The other day I saw the newest Harry Potter movie. The one where Dumbledore is pushed off the edge of the high tower by the dark forces and falls to his death. This wise, kind wizard with his Phoenix bird for a patronus/totem. When I read the book I thought surely the author would bring Dumbledore back, his totem raising him from the ashes into new life. Instead, in the end of the film we stand with Harry watching Fawkes with a great swoop of broad wing, flying away down the mythic valley away from Hogwarts never to return.  We must embrace the sorrow. It is what we are given. This gift, life has taught me, may carry great Gold.

In our Alchemy group last week I made a symbolic fire with dark chains laid over the burned vessel, pieces of tree-bones encirlcing the flames, feathers arching over like wands to catch the Wind. I would burn away the old chains of fear that have held me back. Into this fire I would toss the ancestral terrors, the legacy of old nightmares passed down thru the generations. I would cook the lot of it, turn it into Gold. Its about the soul’s longing for freedom to give it all away, allowing the soul’s true Gift to emerge from the wound. The terrible risk is that it may not become gold. It may be nothing. It may be ash blown by the wind. The Fierce Poets know the risk and I would walk that rim with them. The price of this alchemy is the fullness of the risk.  Kinnell tells us at the end of Another Night in the Ruins:

How many nights must it take

One such as me to learn

That we aren’t, after all, made

From that bird that flies out of its ashes,

that for us

as we go up in the flames, our one work

is

to open ourselves, to be

the flames?

wrensong

Twilight in Owl Grove

There were, in the early morning, soft

dark-barrred feathers under the pines

where She perched, I imagine, at moon-set,

after a long night’s hunt over the misty

fields, pruning with the golden hook of

her beak the silken barbs of plume

and down, watching, as she always does,

for the movement of small hot-hearted

things innocently below. There would be

in her still gaze a fierce quiet, until, with

the slow turn and lift of the soundless

wings, she disappeared into the shadows

at the edge of day.

Once, in the evening as the light fell

and the sun settled orange behind the

trees, as I sat on the fallen body of an old

cottonwood playing the simple tones

of a cedar flute into the twilight, she came

out of the woods without a whisper to

perch at the tip of a dead oak limb where

she turned her curious gaze upon me and

listened. Only a brief moment before she

turned her back without response, lifted

and vanished into the thickening dusk.

There can only be in moments like this,

when Wildness comes silently out from

the hidden roosts of Mystery to meet us,

a breathless shimmering in the web of time.

Something shifts. Nothing in the singing

night air will ever be the same.

wrensong, July 2009

Whispers of Grace

Across an open field,

green and heavy with

dew, mist rises into

sunrise. Wren, with

song clear as light,

at the edge of the wood,

and robin

Owl watches

unseen from

dark limbs

deer browsing

at the verge of day.

And where the mown hill

slopes easily down to

a gurgling stream,

where graceful cypress,

still as first dawn,

breathe into the quiet air,

ancestral oaks hold the

prayers of time woven

in their roots.

Here whispers of grace

falling thru shafts of sun,

scatter like seed-fluff

or feather.

Here a young man is offering

vows into the  grass,

to the sky.

Here a woman is dancing.

- wrensong, King’s House, July 2009

Twilight…

There are women in the forest as the sun is setting, the pileated woodpecker scolding at dogs. The light is dim under the green canopy. I am intending to stay until dark. The mud trail is wet from recent rains, the air thick and still. I walk, browsing the creek bed where the water makes a low trickle over the stones. In the falling light there are few colors. I duck under the tree over the creek that seems to have become a ceremonial log. There are rocks balanced across it, a drape of old leaves. One stone I added a week ago still stands. I find another, this one like the profile of a man with a hole for an eye. A god. A creek spirit to guard the stream from above. I think about how dark it will be soon. How the light will fade sooner here under the heavy canopy. I wonder how I will find my way up the path in the deep dark. I feel the fear of it. I wonder what it is I remember about being in the dark, being afraid, not being able to see. It’s not being able to see. Here there are no predators to stalk me in this night. Only the small creatures of a suburban wood. raccoons, possum, deer. With luck a coyote or fox. Nothing to fear. Yet fear haunts this going even long before nightfall.

The air is green. Still. Wet on my skin as I walk toward the river. In the low land the ground is soggy and smells of old floods. Winter leaves plastered with mud over the trail. I don’t like the woods here. It always feels murky, wet. Floods have come and gone frequently this year. Now the river is down. The bank sloping deeper into the quiet, wide water, gravel bars stretching out into the current. The opposite bank is covered with loose rip-rap and shacks. Across the flat water there are seed puffs floating, or foam from some pollutant. Hard to tell. Down stream over the highway bridge the trucks stream west roaring. It’s the roar of traffic here in this small patch of forest that always gets me. In this wedge between two highways there is always the din of engines. Tonight the rocks are brown with river silt and asleep. None want to play or make poems with me. There the river is poluted, over-used. The stones are dull.

Walking back I go a way I don’t know trusting the damp path, noticing the sounds of birds chucking the evening, a robin in her twilight song, the trill of wren, the rising hum of the cicadas in the high leaves. The trees are utterly still. Not a breath of wind. Where the trail meets the creek again I sit for a long time on a stack of stones sensing the place, letting the stillness of the trees hold me, the quiet stones, the trucks. Once in another forest I heard the trees say to me “Trees were the first poets”, a simple statement of truth. I wondered for a moment if stones weren’t the first but soon realized stones spoke another language before the trees taught them about poetry. The language of stones is ancient, cryptic, slow.

Sitting now on the cold limestone by the creek I sense a wakefullness, a presence. Pondering again the coming dark, the fear of not being able to see the way back. Some old fear, something I can’t pull up from memory, a time being lost in the woods alone in the dark? Remembering a path I took as a child from the neighbor’s house to my own. A narrow path thru the trees. I would feel my way along keeping my eye on the light from the kitchen window, knowing my mother was in there fixing dinner. The path gone now and the woods and the window. Here there is dark coming and I’m alone and the old fear is in my pocket.

All around me the trees are standing still, the night insects are droning, the air damp on my skin. Always the roar of the traffic filling the space between the leaves. I wonder how all this racket effects the trees. What would I sense if I had no ears? What do trees know of sound? Does it rattle their roots as much as it rattles my soul? Do they get used to it?

Today there is an article in the New York Times suggesting that we are fillling our oceans with so much noise it is blowing out the brains of fish. Whales go crazy, loose their way, beach themselves to die in despair. Do we have any idea what we do with our machines? Have we grown so insensate, so inured to sound we don’t hear any more? Do trees go crazy with all this din from the highways? What does it do to the delicate fibers of roots, the green speech of the leaves? Can they hear themselves think? It is now sunset and I am drowning in the roar of trucks. Night is as much about silence as it is about dark. I need silence to hear the small sounds, the soft footfalls, the cicadas. Its not full dark but I need to leave. I take the mud path up the steep slope again stepping carefully over fallen logs, around boulders wondering where the night is silent enough to hear itself breathe.

There is deep in the Hoh rain forest of the Olympic peninsula a place a man has claimed as One Square Inch of Silence. He studied this out for a long time. He measured the distance from highways and airplane routes and found it. He staked a claim on behalf of Silence. When you go there you wear cotton clothes that don’t rustle. You go quietly. There you sit.  And you listen. Silence. I feel such gratitude for this man’s difficult and graced mission. I want to go there.

Home again, well past sunset. I take a candle into the yard and place it in the fire pit under the trees. I sit on the wood bench for a long time watching the bats swooping among the oak limbs. I see them against the vibrant twilight sky where the leaves are etched in fine dark silouettes. Not far off, the roads are shushing with cars, rail lines carrying coal trains and commuters. In my yard the grass is quiet, the trees dark and still, a small breeze high riffling the dark leaves. I see them move against the sky. Wings whisper and disappear. I imagine how bats hear each other, sonoring off  houses and tree trunks with calls beyond human sense. They swoop in their fast looping flight silently feeding on invisible insects. I wonder if the urban racket, the pitch of sirens, the descibels of jet engines interferes with their navigation. Do they sense the streams of communication we send careening thru space? They seem to survive us. They stick around. A cat as dark as night jumps onto the bench next to me, mews in greeting and lies down to watch the coming night. We sit together for a long time without speaking. Twilight fades to full dark. I blow out the candle. There are silent things in the dark, I am convinced, that we have no idea of. Silent imaginings, poems of old tree roots and stones. The winged song of night creatures. I had no idea we had so many bats.

“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.”

-Wendell Berry

wrensong