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.

up to the end, he was an avowed, unrepentant atheist who previously wrote a book called ‘god is not great, how religion poisons everything’    this is perhaps why someone wrote that the cancer was god’s punishment for his blasphemy and hoped he rotted in hell.   with typical wry humor, hitchens wonders why not a lightning bolt?  he does note. though, that when physicist neils bohr hung a horseshoe over his door, he explained to his friends shocked by this pathetic superstition: “apparently it works whether you believe in it or not”.

In a Vanity Fair piece that was published only days before he died, Hitchens reaffirmed that he hoped to be fully conscious and awake as he passed away, “in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense… I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span,”

i admire the strength of character to not opt for an easy conversion, even at the end, and hitchens in the past empathized with voltaire, who, when badgered on his deathbed to renounce the devil, murmured that this was no time to be making enemies

As a passionate believer in the democracy of reading, I don’t think it’s the task of the author of a book to tell the reader what it means.

The meaning of a story emerges in the meeting between the words on the page and the thoughts in the reader’s mind. So when people ask me what I meant by this story, or what was the message I was trying to convey in that one, I have to explain that I’m not going to explain.

Anyway, I’m not in the message business; I’m in the “Once upon a time” business.

Speaking of which, he also said

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

It’s the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, winter in the southern, which means – guess what? -  must be time for my biennial solstice email.  Hard to believe this ritual has been going on for ten years: sending out some snippets of verse, a few hopefully appropriate thoughts, and greetings to friends and colleagues all over the world. 

 Have been thinking a lot recently about story, in the broadest sense.  What are the stories we tell to our children and young people on the stage? what are the stories we tell about ourselves, about our dreams, about our history?  What is the intersection of our narratives with our lives?  Are stories – and the act of storytelling – an intrinsic part of our human DNA?  Can we chart the origin of stories as we chart the origin of species with stories shared across cultures and across centuries?  Do these deep and essential stories change?  Where do these stories come from, both the ones we know and the ones we make up? 

from Ars Poetica by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz

The purpose of poetry is to remind us 
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,  
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

from Blue Dark by US poet Deborah Landau

the moon might rise and it might not
and if it brings a ghost light we will read beneath it

and if it returns to earth
we will listen for its phrases

and if I’m alone at the bedside table
I will have a ghost book to refer to

and when I lie back I’ll see its imprint
beneath my blood-red lids:

not lettered ink
but the clean page

from ‘His Master’s Voice’ by US poet Troy Jollimore

We have let our children grow tall
without teaching them the songs of the elders

The songs we ourselves used to chant
in the interminable, reverberating night

The songs we ourselves used to chant
side by side, hand in hand, as the stars gave violent
birth to stars

the songs we would sing
and sing and sing
to drive away the danger

from Parts of Speech, by South African poet Indrid de Kok

Why still believe stories can rise
with wings, on currents, as silver flares,
levitate unweighted by stones,
begin in pain and move towards grace,
aerating history with recovered breath?

With warmest best wishes to you and your families, with hopes that all of our lives are filled with open doors and clean pages, with stories that drive away dangers and rise on wings, like silver flares.

“Fairy Tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”