New Year’s Reflection: What in Past is Present

As the aura of Solstice clings to the mind, and the soul considers it’s life in the world, somehow in my imagination I travel back in time to that simple splendor of our increasingly mythical past, when on lonely winter nights— in one comes from the horse-barn, feet so cold you can only feel the frozen knife’s edge with each step; and suddenly a hearty lover’s-made hearth’s fire, a cup of hot mulled wine, and a soft hand at the shoulder.  While outside, stars, like splinters of ice, fall across the black abyss of night, and the New Moon leaves only a memory of bright, cold snow on a sleeping fallow field.

One finds hope in the thought of lengthening days, singing songs of a boundless grace gifted so long ago. With that hope feeding the imagination, such blessings may come.  Then to bed—pleasures of love, whispering shared dreams, private wants, soothed fears. And as the night’s other-worldly time curls in about you, your attention is suddenly captured like a moth in the dark square of a frost-glistening window.

So still. Not even the sound of the moon on the ice and snow, for the New Moon has wiped clean the onyx sky, polished up its sparkling scion, and gone to bed.

Now you sigh in your quietude, look in over the landscape of your own life, your forgiveness, that which remains unforgiven, that which seems true but may not be, and that which you hold dearer than truth.  It’s just you and that infinite starry void and the frost-etched pane of thin glass between.

Into sleep you vanish. Dreams, silence, memory, creation. What happens there, by grace or by curse—mysteries to the day-lit certainties that wither like last summer’s flowers. Those depths of enigmatic imagining persist like what lies in the dark underground beneath the rusting plow, giving potency to every moment.

Now, in the distance, the crackling of lake ice contracting in the gathering cold. Wolves cry on the far side of the mountain forest. But in your warm sleep, distance enfolds these things in a placid mantel of mere familiarity. All is yours and you belong to all. The separateness of “I” has slipped under the ice and sinks, dwindling, into the darkness below.

You wait no longer for magical transformation or miraculous deliverance. You are the miracle, for Now has become the free, infinite land of your own blessed imagination.