Light Through Pine
I have been keenly aware this season – of the subtle shift of light – from light into further darkness, and now, that slow move from dark back into the light. My insides seem to have slowly shifted, along with this balance of light and dark. I have somehow felt the veil between the two to be very thin. More balanced. Not one without the other. The way I sometimes feel when a presence of someone who has died is with me as I walk, as if still alive in this world. Maybe these veils – between the seasons, from young into middle-age, between the living and the dead – are thinner than we know.
As a child, I remember getting shaken out of bed by my mom or dad – scooted outside into the dark – so we could cover the tomatoes before the first frost. If we didn’t, the tomatoes would not make it through that cold night. We needed to put them to sleep, keep them warm during that first frost. Similar to how my parents must have put us to sleep – a sheet nudged under our chin, a light blanket tucked in by the earth. What I remember most is my dad driving across the lawn in his old truck, pulling up in front of the garden and shining headlights on his wife and four kids (the 5th yet to come) – pyjamas peeking out under our coats, dancing above our boots, as we leapt over tomato plants like garden faeries.
The only thing that has ever made sense to me is to tune into the seasons – the snow melt and buds popping out of tree branches, the hot sun bringing the dormant back to life. If there is a God, for me She is the energy that perpetuates these seasons and cycles. I’m sure my bones are infused with this knowing from my German and Irish agrarian ancestors. Their lives depended on paying attention to these subtle shifts in nature for a good harvest come fall. They hadn’t forgotten how their lives intertwine with the land, dependent on her for abundance.
I met my first grandnephew, baby Grey – who is the first to bring in the next generation of the Doege family. As we do in this day, our first meeting was over FaceTime – us in a British Columbia, him swimming in my sister’s pool in Venice, Florida. I sat in awe, asserting that we must use the iPad so we could see everyone more clearly on the “bigger” screen. The camera scanned from my mom, now 84 and looking very much like my grandpa Sinon (her father) in his later years, to my brother Gerry (a shout out: “hey grandpa!”), as he walked me outside to meet baby Grey. There he was – carried back and forth on the surface of the water by his beaming parents, my niece and her partner. Hold this moment. In seeing him, I want more for our world.
While I’ve been writing this musing this week, bombs have been flying through the skies of Iraq and Iran, killing those targeted, or attempting to. I have just learned that the plane that crashed and killed 176 people (57 Canadians) just outside of Tehran was likely shot down by an Iranian missile. We have yet to know if this was intentional or an accident. Does it really matter? What to do with this tragic news? Before this event, I decided to tune out of the news in the coming weeks but was pulled back in by these missiles shooting through the sky.
Recently, I have noticed many of us desperate to reach back into the world of the small, the immediate world of our friends, families and communities. We are too exhausted, overwhelmed by the darkness of the big – tired of learning of tragedies and pain we can do nothing about. We are also starved for good, for the energy of light – for kindness and connection and generosity that is also around us, always. We move through our days in this balancing act – no light without the dark. This year, I am committed to focusing on and feeding the light – like my dad’s headlights shining on those garden faeries – just trying to warm one cold night.