WINTER 2005
s I write this piece, November nears. November is, for me, a month of beginnings and a month of endings. It is the month Mario and I celebrate the anniversary of Rob being placed in our house for eventual adoption. It is also the month we celebrate the anniversaries of both our daughter's death and my brother's murder, although the two events happened decades apart.
It is one of the two months I call the "grey months" (December is the other) – when the leaves fall off the trees, the ground is barren and brown, but there is not yet a covering of snow. January's magical icicles hanging from the buttonwoods and lace of ice crystals stranded along the telephone lines is only a future memory. Now the days are a gloomy grey. The night comes early and stays late.
And yet November and December are also, for me, months of promise. The seeds are buried in the ground – the hope of next May's glorious flowers and next October's bounteous harvest. It is the beginning of two months of holy days. It is a time for learning once again how to live in closeness with those we love the most: feasting and sharing and giving.
Among the Creeks and the Cherokees, it marks the first days of gathering around the fire and telling stories. We tend to be too busy in the spring and the summer and the fall to tell stories, to play quiet games over mugs of hot chocolate, to learn the dreams of the ones closest to us. Spring and summer and autumn are times when we travel and visit the neighbors and party. Now is the time for family and the closest of friends. Now is the time for cultivating our deepest loves (out of which grow all other loves). Now is the time for long prayers and silent retreats and deep reflections on our lives. I write more poems in the winter than in the summer. I quilt more and make more rag rugs. I cook more.
It is also a time for looking over the year: both personally and globally. Globally, 2005 has been a year of tragedies: earthquakes, tidal waves, hurricanes, mud slides, snow storms, fires, volcanoes. It has also been a year when people have risen up and given more time and more money to charity than has ever been recorded in any past year. We have responded to the sorrows of others with love and concern.
And I feel we have responded in a different way to those tragedies than we often have in the past. We were not simply the rich giving to the poor (a giving that always carries with it a certain "bad taste" for the recipient, and a certain heart hardness for the giver). It seems to me that many people were giving out of a new and deep awareness of our common humanness, our common ability to love and to mourn and to feel pain. Wars and genocides and political intrigues continued, but, in my mind, they became less grey because of the bright rainbow of caring the world blazed across the skies in response to the needs of the victims of a hurricane on the US gulf coast and an earthquake in Pakistan and landslides in Oaxaca.
I enter these grey months with renewed hope in the possibility of a generation rising up and demanding that weapons be transformed into books and computers for schools, into medicines for hospitals, and, yes, even into the proverbial plows for our gardens.
Sondra Ball
Clerk, Salem Quarterly MeetingRETURN TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Last modified:
Monday, November 21, 2005 at 04:25 PM
