by Laura K Secor

Happy Winter Solstice, my UUCW friends!

This December, I will start with a quote from the Jungian analyst James Hollis, from his book “Living an Examined Life: Wisdom For the Second Half of the Journey.”

“In the Western world, we humans are defined as behaviors, thought constructs and biological processes. but such a definition of the human being leaves out the most important thing of all: we are a meaning-seeking, meaning-creating animal, an animal that profoundly suffers the disconnect from meaning…. Over the last few centuries, mythic linkage to the mysteries have eroded and been replace by secular surrogates and sundry distractions. With greater freedom for more persons than anytime in the history of this planet, we have more souls adrift. As Jung put it, we have fallen off the roof of the medieval cathedral into the abyss of the self. How to dialogue with the inner world, after the mythic dissolution that threw so many unprepared millions back on their own resources?”

At this time of year, many of us reach to the many mythologies of the pagan Winter Solstice and the Christian holiday that grew up around it. But not everyone finds the celebration of Christmas satisfying to their soul. It doesn’t give us soul-meaning. As meaning-seeking creatures, no longer tethered to the myths of our ancestors, where do we turn?

I believe that inside each person is an entire universe of story, narrative possibility, mythic imagination. We can each of us create our own meaning. And we don’t do it alone. We draw on all the culture of our ancestors, but also on the marvels of the natural world and the understandings that scientists have produced. There is so much to draw on, when creating our own meaning.

One of the marvelous myth-makers of our time, Louise Gluck, made a life creating meaning out of myth and nature and science. At this time of year, when there is so much darkness outside and our lives are lit by artificial lights, we can turn to our modern mystics for inspiration and companionship. Let this be a season to celebrate our ability to invent the narratives of our lives.

A Sharply Worded Silence

Louise Gluck

Let me tell you something, said the old woman.
We were sitting, facing each other,
in the park at _, a city famous for its wooden toys.

At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,
and as a kind of penance or self-punishment, I was working
at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.

The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours
after sunset, when it was often abandoned.
But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa’s Garden,
I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now
I could have gone ahead, but I had been
set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees
with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.

We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,
and with it came a feeling of enclosure
as in a train cabin.

When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight
and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.
That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.
I preferred the moon’s rising, and sometimes I would hear,
at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble
of The Marriage of Figaro. Where did the music come from?
I never knew.

Because it is the nature of garden paths
to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,
I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,
barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.

It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.

But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds
and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.
And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.

I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,
was in fact interrupted at every stage with trance-like pauses
and prolonged intermissions, so that by this time night had started.

Ah the capacious night, the night
so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret
was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed
from one hand to another in a relay.

My sincere apologies, she said.
I had mistaken you for one of my friends.
And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,
heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women
holding granite babies to their breasts.
Not changeable, she said, like human beings.

I gave up on them, she said.
But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.
Correct me if I’m wrong.

Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun
to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,
drifting and falling apart, and where they landed
new worlds would form.

Soon afterward I returned to my native city
and was reunited with my former lover.
And yet increasingly my mind returned to this incident,
studying it from all perspectives, each year more intensely convinced,
despite the absence of evidence, that it contained some secret.
I concluded finally that whatever message there might have been
was not contained in speech – so, I realized, my mother used to speak to me,
her sharply worded silences cautioning me and chastising me –

and it seemed to me I had not only returned to my lover
but was now returning to the Contessa’s Garden
in which the cherry trees were still blooming
like a pilgrim seeking expiation and forgiveness,

so I assumed there would be, at some point,
a door with a glittering knob,
but when this would happen and where I had no idea.