Solstice Child
In honor of the publication of my memoir, Boundless, today, I offer you a contemplation on Winter Solstice. With a little homage to Rainer Maria Rilke, who tells us how to love the darkness.
I am about to be born. All around, the darkness is deepening. All the fires of the world enfence me. The darkness pulls in everything. A force of life gathers in my mother’s womb, seeking to become me. (But why? Why will there be a me?) The darkness won’t let the question have an answer. The darkness is too magnetic, too volcanic, too engulfing for that. The darkness will let me have only this parabolic query that bends back over itself and is an infinite line. The question carves a path symmetrical and fizzing through a point of star that is my mother’s womb now, in these weeks before Solstice.
In the dwindling December light, she stands against the fading sky, about to become my mother, another dimension of herself. (But why? Why will there be a her?) Behind her in the dusky light is the sky-blue Studebaker my father buys one month before he becomes my father. (But why? Why will there be a him?) She folds her hands over her full-bloomed belly, cradling the place where I’m trying to become myself. I’m not yet asking to be born. That is too big of a question.
I’ll be born not as in borne
Not as in carried
Not a burden
Not cross to bear
Not as in bearing witness
Not as in baring
But stripped
To my essence
And then born
Born as in born
Into something new
Born as in I am new
Born as in again
But not again
Born as in new
New knew known not known
Born as in someone carried me
Born as in someone bore witness to me
Born as in I’ll never again be what I was before
An ovum
A zygote
An embryo
A fetus
A baby about to be born
Born as in born whip-smart
Born with a silver spoon
Born a bad seed
Born for nothing
Born with a veil
Born in a bubble
Born a mermaid
Born of the sea
Born as in a district in a city in Spain with Gothic walls
Born as in a hometown with emerald lawns and pearly curbs
Born as in sceilig cliffs on a wild Atlantic that dagger white waves
Born as in belonging to a place
Born here
Born yes
Born no
Born maybe
Born with second sight
Born of woman
Born of water
Born of light
Born of necessity
Born in due time
Born this way
Born to be wild
Born for such a time as this
“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”~Rainer Maria Rilke
On Solstice night, the darkness pulls in everything, the high spruce trees against the sky sparking with violet stars, the deer of the forest, the distant lights of the city, the knowledge of the places I will go, the people who will love me and the people who will not, the jobs I’ll have, the books I’ll write, the words I’ll say, the words I’ll swallow, the words I’ll live by, the children who will form in my womb but vanish before they can be borne born belong, the children I will give birth to, the tears I’ll cry, the dark mountain I’ll climb alone, the rose-striped canyons and the sun-glassed sea on the horizons I’ll always be seeking.
I’ll come anyway, anyhow.
I’ll come on the darkest day.
After the day it happens, the day the light splits the stacked Anasazi stone at Chaco and the passage tomb at Newgrange, it has happened. My planet holds its breath, seeming to not move for four turns as it is beheld in the apple eye of the sun.
The parents who just became parents hold the miracle of being trusted with my life. They have now become themselves.
My hemisphere tilts toward the light, and we seem to move again. We conspire. It is Christmas. On this night, the sky flutters with snow crystals of light that ring the Cimmerian circle of us, a newly born family. “Our present,” my mother says when my father brings the car around, lifting the blanket of me up to him. Their love refined to perfection now. The night sky white with culmination and stars and stirrings. I am still, even though the darkness pulls in everything.
Boundless is available !
BOOKSHOP - proceeds go to Bookworks, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque
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