What a strange week it is, between Christmas and New Year – a twilight zone, a threshold, a time of waning where the light slowly dies to make way for fresh illumination. Far from wanting to celebrate, my instinct is to withdraw into a cocoon to wait for the energy to shift. I want to be quiet, reflective and inwardly focused – I do not want to be clinking glasses with strangers. Let me decide when I’m ready to emerge!
To mark this liminal phase, I’d like to share a poem by Kim Rosen (www.kimrosen.net), whose work I discovered a few months ago via her
album Only Breath – a stunning collection of poetry set to music by brilliant cellist Jami Sieber.
I love the idea that there are times in life when you transform – but that before the transformation can occur, you must stay in a still, dark space and just be. Even when it seems like nothing is happening, magic is at work at a level way beyond your conscious control. For so long you seem stuck, immobile; then, one miraculous day, you find you can fly…
In Impossible Darkness
Do you know
how the caterpillar
turns?
Do you remember
what happens
inside a cocoon?
You liquefy.
There in the thick black
of your self-spun womb
void as the moon before waxing,
you melt
(as Christ did
for three days
in the tomb)
conceiving
in impossible darkness
the sheer inevitability
of wings
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