We’re right at the edge of what friends in the southern hemisphere call the summer solstice and what we in the northern call the winter solstice. Hard to believe it’s been ten years now for the ritual of sending these messages twice a year to friends and colleagues all over the world.
It’s not a coincidence that so many civilizations have rituals – both sacred and secular – around the June and December solstices. For me, this ritual combines the timeless (sharing of words) and the immediate (sent via email), often with a fascinating interplay. This lovely tension somehow echoes any of a number of busy streets in Tokyo where a tiny, centuries-old Buddhist temple sits next to an ultra-modern skyscraper, equal (but vastly different) companions.
Choosing the poems is always a serendipitous process, grazing through poetry books, anthologies, and web sites until a pattern reveals itself. This time the movement is from darkness to light, in forests, with birds, in and around differing perceptions of reality and time.
From ‘The Prelude’, by US poet Matthew Zapruder
Come to the edge
the edge beckoned softly. Take
this cup full of darkness and stay as long
as you want and maybe a little longer.
From the Chinese poet Wu Wei, translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Deep in the mountain wilderness
Where nobody ever comes
Only once in a great while
Something like the sound of a far-off voice.
The low rays of the sun
Slip through the dark forest,
And gleam again on the shadowy moss.
From ‘Moment’, by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh (nature as theater and a brook and birds as actors)
Everything’s in its place and in polite agreement.
in the valley a little brook cast as a little brook.
A path in the role of a path from always to ever.
Woods disguised as woods alive without end,
and above them birds in flight play birds in flight.
The moment reigns as far as the eye can reach,
One of those earthly moments
invited to linger.
‘The New Song’, by US poet WS Merwin (would that we all could say so much in so few words and with so little (read: none) punctuation)
For some time I thought there was time
and there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it for the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then
there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song
With warmest best wishes to you and your family for the holiday season and a new year where all of us have time to linger (as long as we want and longer); to hear voices in a silent forest; where the only roles played are the true ones; where there’s space and time to hear the new song; and even, if we’re very lucky, sing one ourselves.
