Exquisite, Lavish, Astonishing Darkness

This coming week will mark the shortest days and the longest nights of the year. I’m seeking to both sink in to its unique gifts as well as hold on through its dark depths. These beautiful works of art understand what a strain it is for the soul to hope when light feels scarce while also nourishing us through the emotional leanness that so often accompanies grief and loss.

My dear friend, Julie, recently introduced me to the Colorado poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer. You can sign up for her poem a day email here. My favorite poem of hers (so far) is entitled “Too Late?”

By the time we arrive at the cliffside
to watch the sunset, the darkness
has already come. But because
of the ink-ish sky, we see thousands
of yellow lights glitter across the harbor.
And moonlight on the water makes
the blackened surface shine. How often
do I think I’m too late, only to find I have
arrived at just the right moment,
the moment in which there is a beauty
beyond the one I knew to wish for.
Like how, when I thought it was too late
to forgive, forgiveness arrived with its
soft and generous hands. Like how when
I thought I was too late to love, love
bloomed like a sunset, radiant and blazing,
and stayed, the way sunsets never do.
Like how I believed I was here to adore the light,
I came to learn how exquisite, how
lavish, how astonishing, the dark.

In a recent Scripture Circle through Anam Cara Ministries, leader Tara Owens briefly mentioned the difference between the questions Mary (mother of Jesus) and Zechariah (father of John the Baptist) ask in the first chapter of the gospel of Luke. Zechariah asks, “How can I know that what you say is true?” but Mary asks, “How will this happen since I am a virgin?” Tara, as usual, didn’t say much more leaving us all consider for ourselves the spirit of each question, but I’ve been wrestling this past week to stay in the amazement of “how will” questions instead of entertaining the doubts of “how can” questions.

When I proclaimed that the Springsteen bioepic Destination to Nowhere would be my top movie of the year, I spoke too soon. As much as I loved the film, the mesmerizing Hamnet has overtaken it as the most moving film I’ve seen this year. It is as sobering and emotional as you’ve heard, and I still found it enchanting, uplifting and inspiring. For me it was a beautiful commentary on the painful disconnection that happens when men and women grieve differently and how the reenactment of art can help them find and see one another again.

And finally, Jan Richardson has a new book of blessings, she just released and I expect it to be as treasured in my collection as all her other works!

Beloved, in all this holiday season holds for you, may you find a beauty beyond what you knew to wish for.

Pulling Perpendicular to the Hold

This time of year, my unofficial job as a therapist is to help people survive the holidays. Though I’m not (yet) an experienced rock climber, I love the analogy of finding new handholds that help me hang on when I feel lonely, untethered and lost in what feels like should be my closest relationships. In the past two weeks, I’ve gone searching for anchors and solidness to help me hang on as I welcome my college-aged kids home after my first months empty nesting, integrate a step-sister I was estranged from for years back into my life, and figure out how to resource my kids as their dad gets remarried next week—their first big life event I won’t be a part of. Here are some of the words and ideas I’m clinging to this Thanksgiving season in case you also find yourself in precarious emotional territory and need places that can bear some of the weight you are carrying.

Wise rock climbing advice from REI:

• “Focus on the direction you want to pull. To get the strongest and easiest grip, pull perpendicular to the hold. Line your weight up with that direction of pull and you'll be less likely to come off the rock.” (watch the full video for more fascinating resilience analogies!)

Beautiful lines from a few of my (current) favorite Mary Oliver poems:

• Thirst

  • “Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have.”

• Sunflowers

  • “all those rows of seeds —each one a new life! —hope for a deeper acquaintance; each of them, though it stands in a crowd of many, like a separate universe, is lonely, the long work of turning their lives into a celebration is not easy.”

From David Whyte’s book Consolations, an excerpt from his beautiful prose piece called Longing:

• “Longing is nothing without it’s dangerous edge, that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril. The foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to other-ness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing…”

Finally, I’m halfway through Tracey Gee’s fabulous book The Magic of Knowing What You Want and I keep coming back to this amazing sentence:

• “Abundance does not need certainty to exist.”

Where NoWhere Takes Us

I’m predicting that by the end of 2025, my favorite movie of the year will be the bio-epic Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere that premiered in theaters this past weekend.

Unlike most iconic artist biographies, this brilliant film chooses to explore only a two-three year time period in the life of musician Bruce Springsteen. It isn’t an inspirational summary of his talent or journey to fame but rather a look at a period of deep emotional darkness he courageously moves through before releasing his boldest and most iconic rock music.

Though I want to gush over this film for so many reasons, I’m refraining so as not to spoil the most poignant collection of emotional moments in cinema this year. Instead, here are five great reasons you need to see this film for yourself before you hear or read too much about it. 

1. Jeremy Allen White’s performance was so authentic I quickly stopped gawking at his good looks as he became Springsteen very early in the film. By the end of the two hours, I was not only more knowledgeable about Bruce’s life but actually felt closer to him as a person. 

2. Springsteen returning to the physical city, locations and home where he grew up was a key element of his journey. The movie’s portrayal of all that unlocks, for better and worse, in our emotional landscape was therapeutically on point. 

3. The portrayal of his agent’s wisdom, care and commitment to Bruce as a person, as he straddled his personal and professional role, was inspiring for me as a therapist. 

4. The movie does a brilliant job representing how our past, present and future all crescendo in compounding pressure as we face and wrestle with historic pain. 

5. The final scene will make you squirm, tear up and want to be a more open hearted person. At my age and in my profession, I rarely encounter something that portrays an emotional depth and vulnerability beyond what I feel capable of entering, but the end is so challenging I can sense I will need more depth and courage to follow Bruce’s example. 

“First Lamb To The Slaughter”

I can’t speak for the experience of every eldest daughter but here are three lessons I learned about myself from Taylor Swift’s new song “Eldest Daughter.”

Lyric:

I’m never gonna let you down, I’m never gonna leave you out. I’m never gonna break that vow. I’m never gonna leave you now.

Lesson:

As a first-born female I am, by nature, a fiercely loyal person. This is difficult to feel about myself since I have chosen to leave so many times, but it always took me So. Long. To. Leave. It was 17 years before I was ready to leave a mentally unwell mother—my first mirror. It took me 10 years to leave a ministry that was a first family. And it took me 8 years to leave a marriage that was a reprieve from domination. Let me be clear—I was in those systems for far longer. This is how long I spent trying to maneuver around abuse, gender inequity and neglect before I was convinced there was no way to stay. I know so many women who were, like me, overly responsible in our families growing up, who have left spaces, for the sake of those we love, where we overfunction. And it eats at our souls because we are, despite what the story may seem like on the surface, women who want to remain by your side.

Lyric:

Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter, so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire. But I’m not a bad bitch and this isn’t savage.

Lesson:

Patriarchy requires that I, as a woman emotionally labor for others more than is humanly healthy. Growing up, this meant I learned to sacrifice myself. Eventually, I developed a fierceness to do what was right for my relationships over what was wanted from me, but it meant channeling an untamed (and honestly, sometimes, a bit unhinged) strength. I was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, but was experienced as overly adversarial. I spent so much time trying to explain my motivation in acts of protest and boycott but it left me looking defensive, as if I were an unloving force of destruction.

Even recently, I was in a situationship where I was generously handing the key to the front door of being a part of my life while also refusing any back door way around vulnerable desire. In a final email I was told, “You win.” I was angry for three hours and then deeply sad for three days. I didn’t want to win. This wasn’t, for me, a competition. I don’t enjoy a battle of wills. I was simply fighting for a long-term good, a potential future even if it wasn’t right now. It wasn’t a fight with, it was a fight for.

Lyric:

A beautiful, beautiful time lapse, ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs, that shimmers that innocent light back, like when were young.

Lesson:

My path forward as an eldest daughter isn’t to keep being responsible for the world but to learn a relaxed openness to joy that I’ve never known. This is how I will become a truer home, first for myself, but also for those who have felt unprotected by the wildly violent world we are all surviving.

Your next invitation? Listen to the infectiously light song “Opalite” that every overly burdened person is trying to dance deep into their psyche!