The practice helped bring me up out of my internal clouds at this darkest time of year. I wrote this piece about my experience at the prompting of Rev. Cathy Rion-Starr of the Unitarian Society of Hartford, and shared it from the pulpit on January 4, 2015.
Thoughts on the Shifting
Light Practice
It’s hard to feel much enthusiasm for this time of year, as
the landscape becomes drab and the days short and bleary. So I welcomed the Shifting
Light practice as an opportunity to go out of my way to look for beauty in the
natural world, and for that beauty to pull me out of the mildly depressed winter
funk into which I might otherwise have descended.
Noticing the natural world is an ongoing absorption of mine,
and photos of the sky, my garden, sand ripples, sun on water and paths in the
woods crowd my electronic photo library and inform my work as a fiber
artist. But noticing the natural world
is, well, natural, in a place of natural
beauty, like Cape Cod,
or even my garden.
It’s much more of a challenge to extract and relish the
beauty of nature once winter sets in, with its biting temperatures and bleak
monochromatic palette.
And so I’m challenged to look for beauty at this time of
year, and resentful that it is a
challenge.
Especially so right now, in December of 2014, because my
sister Jerol, who is the only remaining sister of the three I once had, fell
down some stairs in the wee hours of November 15 and ended up with traumatic
brain injuries from which she has yet to emerge into full consciousness. I spend a lot of time worrying about
her. I also spend a lot of time driving
to see her in the rehabilitation center where she’s currently a patient, which
is in Lake Katrine, New York, two hours away.
The drive to Lake Katrine goes through some of Connecticut’s
prettiest country, where the landscape tilts upward and melds into the gentle
foothills of the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts and the Catskill
mountains of New York State.
But this one particular day, as a compassionate friend made
the trip with me, transporting me in her car for the four hours it took to get
there and back, I was having none of it.
Bleak, bleak, bleak was all I saw in the endless road with its scenery
of broken cornstalks and dark ponds.
It took my friend in the driver’s seat to get me to notice
that the trees were covered with white lace that day, snow that had fallen
overnight and had not yet melted in the daylight—rare enough, as the snow on
the tiny twigs is always the first to melt.
It took my friend to point out the fairy landscape, all the more
beautiful because of its evanescently transitory nature. And so, for the rest of that drive, I gloried
in that beauty, and on the way back, as
twilight turned the hills over the Hudson lavender and periwinkle, and a few
stray flakes crossed the headlights, I reveled in it again.
The point for me is how much we stand to gain from others in
our spiritual quests. By nature, I’m a
vertical worshiper—the spiritual uplift is a direct path from me to nature and
the spirit of the universe. Horizontal
worship—drawing spiritual strength from others on the same plane—is less my
style. But when something like this
happens, I recognize the power and potential of people in a group to shine one
another’s spirits in such a way that they share in something outside, and
larger than, themselves.
In my Catholic religion classes, I learned that Jesus said
“I am the vine and you are the branches.”
By that he meant that we have an indwelling spirit as a commonality
among us. When I got to law school, a
trial practice expert told my class of his belief that when jurors retreated
into a jury room, a spirit made up of themselves, but larger, would arise among
them, informing their debates.
Which, I think, are two different ways of talking about the
value and strength of community. And
that’s part of the point of the Shifting Light practice: drawing strength from
one another in these darkest days.
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