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.
