Everything is Given You

The turning of the seasons, and in particular, the hidden richness in the fallow winter season, have long been of special interest to me. When I lived in Brooklyn, I loved walking through the Botanic Garden in the dead months, hunting for the smallest signs of transformation. A bud months away from blossoms just starting to swell on a branch, a shoot just breaking ground. The space felt rich with meaning and metaphor, and was my companion through some interior winter seasons, bringing me hope that new life would come in its own time.

I’ve written a number of meditations on these themes over the years, and the transition to spring always seems to call them to mind. I love how nature’s seasons can mirror and assure us of the cyclical nature of our own personal seasons: “It won’t always be this way.”

I was reminded of the piece below this past weekend, while at another of my retreats for the Coracle fellowship I’m in this year. We were meditating on how interior winters can bring us to the end of ourself. Which in turn offers a doorway to the beginning of wisdom, an opportunity to stop rowing so hard and learn to put up sails and give yourself over to the wind. One of the fundamental truths at the bottom of Christianity, so simple, yet elusive: What I most need and desire must be received, not acheived. I cannot create the goodness I yearn for, in myself or in the world, in my own power.

I wrote this during the season of my father’s journey through cancer to death (and, in my belief system, true and eternal life in God). It was brutal, and it was a time of God’s nearness in ways that elicit tears just thinking back, though hard to put into words, as wordy as I am. It had been a dead season for my writing; I’d set it aside for a period, and couldn’t find inspiration. Turns out, your father dying makes for some good writing inspiration. He was diagnosed in late spring 2013, nearly a decade ago. I had listened to this intriguing piece from RadioLab, called “Why isn’t the sky blue?” and somewhere between that, the winter Botanic garden, and my yearning and pain came this little meditation. It arrived like a lullaby from God, and I’ve thought of it often over the past decade, huming the first and last lines like a promise. I’ve never shared it, but as you can see in the poem’s own structure, it is made to share.

If you’re tunneling through a winter, I hope it offers you a spark.

Everything is given you:
the sky, the sea, the color blue.
Fantastical and rare, but true:
Everything is given you.

Everything is given you:
The table set anew each dawn,
The bread and wine are never gone,
The joy that you’re bid feast upon.

The joy that you’re bid feast upon,
The streaming light at break of day,
The blinding summer sun’s hot ray,
The foggy winter’s frozen gray.

The foggy winter’s frozen gray:
All that you shed as days grow cold,
The sorrow your bare branches hold,
The pain refining you as gold.

The pain refining you as gold,
The loss, the grief, the season’s sting,
The comfort, the enfolding wings,
The hard-won songs you still shall sing.

The hard-won songs you still shall sing,
The words belabored, as through fight,
The words still-born, the words born right.
The words like candles burning bright.

The words like candles burning bright:
Signals of a sure way through,
Your gift to other travelers, too.
Everything is given you.