I am a child of silence

A puppy of royal blood

Chewing on the world.

I let go

Jaws gaping open

The tiny drop of desire 

Falls from my tongue

And into the chasm flows stillness

finding

in the gullet

its own

silent laughter.

 ML12/22/2022

These are the dark days, Resounding and Luminous.  The sacred days between the slowing, stilling then turning of Solstice sun toward distant summer, and Christmas Day, the symbolic rebirth of the Light.

The energies rest deep in their gestational egg, barely able to reach out and engage the outer carnival of the world….Not without tiny medicinal  doses of chocolate, precisely administered to animate the friendly ghosts of the social self and the writerly mind.

From the radiance within this quiet well, I wish you all many a moment suffused with gratitude, renewal and remembrance.

As a Christmas card this year sagely stated:

The greatest gift of the season is presence.

For a yoga class I led yesterday, I googled for some Soltice themed Haiku, which I share below, along with a couple of other utterances I heard spontaneously issue from my own lips.

Winter solstice

The street cleaner picks up

A glass half full

          (Matthew Paul)

When the Winter chrysanthemums go

there is nothing to write about

but radishes

(Basho)

Winter’s thaw

Starts inside first

Flows toward new home

…

Cover my head

Or my feet

The winter quilt

(Buson)

First snow

Falling

On the unfinished bridge

(Basho)

Laughing out loud

What’s been is Gone

Smiling at What Is.

(Crow’s Daughter)

Intention bird nests

not yet action

yearning stirs becoming

.

Note: WordPress, my blog host, has made “improvements” that make formatting impossible for me to control. The strange pattern of bold and not, which you may have noticed in the first lines of this post are not my doing. I can only be amused and peer into their mysterious code, awaiting illumination.