WHAT'S LEFT
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
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December 29, 2002
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Two days from now I’ll begin our family Christmas letter. December 31 is just the right time to garner the reverie I need for my thoughts to meld into some coherent sequence about what the year has held for our family. I’m ready then to layer my missive with just enough reflection shy of a sermon. I polish it on New Year’s Day, and over the first weeks of January add personal handwritten notes to each before I send them off. Of course I count on friends and family remembering that they did actually receive holiday greetings from us and keeping us on their list. Sure enough, the cards and letters are still coming in. And I love it. I love milling through the news–glad, celebratory, and so many shades of otherwise–from folks I often don’t hear from except at holiday time.
Just before Christmas, I arrived home to a familiar postmark: Brynmawr, South Wales. It was from my cousin, Ann Morgan, with a warm and newsy letter signed "Ann, Ray, Wendy, and Ruth." Many years ago, my Mother and daughter, Sarah, and I had visited them all on their three hundred year-old farm in the rolling hills of South Wales, that green poetic country that spawned so many of my ancestors. While Mother and I had talked family history and current matters with Ann and Ray; Sarah, Wendy, and Ruth had sought out the newborn lambs among their family’s sizable sheep herds. That long ago visit has ripened into warm memories, so I opened Ann’s card with anticipation. I began to read, but was stopped short by her first sentence: "Another year has passed away."
Another year has passed away. How readily we downplay the ultimacy of death by saying a friend has passed away. Here I was reading of a whole year that had passed away. Is it gone forever? Well, I suppose so, but the passing feels seamless except for the calendar constructs of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Yet we have moved through time and time has moved through us. My cousin, Ann, had fastened so naturally on a passage of soul, not unlike the poet Agnes Zuniga, who describes
…The seasons of the soul turning in their own time,
In their own way (unlike seasons of Earth)….The seasons of the soul…
Bring to each of us a different experience of these
Days of Christmastime and Solstice.When I lose a dear one whom I have known many years, and yes, when I conduct a memorial service for someone I’ve never known, I am reminded that something essential has passed away and moved on. And I ask: What’s left?
What’s left, I wonder, and my thoughts lean into early spring and that process known as sugaring. For those among you who still have snow on your boots from winters in Vermont or New Hampshire or perhaps from the 21-inch gift that Santa dropped on our own state capital--you know that a few months from now the sap will flow in the sugar maples. The temperature will remain well below freezing at night, but at daybreak the sun will rise and linger longer, with the earth just close enough that the sap lines will be loosened. That sweet liquid from which maple syrup is distilled will begin to trickle and then flow in a sure and steady stream into buckets suspended beneath spouts that channel the flow. Then begins the work of sugaring. The sap-filled buckets are transported to a sugarhouse and poured into an evaporator that distills this viscous sweetness into maple syrup.
Now according to Vermont’s Noel Perrin, it takes an average of 32 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup. That’s just the average. There’s something called the Rule of 86 by which you can determine the actual number of gallons of sap required to produce a gallon of syrup. The precise formula is S = 86/X, where S is the number of gallons of sap required to produce that gallon, and 86 is a mathematical constant indicating the percentage of solids in a gallon of syrup. X is the Brix value, a scale measuring the sugar content of the sap. S = 86/X is sort of the E = MC2 of sugaring. Let’s say the sap has a density of 2 degrees Brix. S = 86/2 tells us that 43 gallons of such sap are required for one gallon of syrup. No wonder Perrin calls maple syrup "a sacred article." No wonder New Yorkers will pay upwards of I don’t even know what anymore for a spare half-pint of this golden liquid to pour on pancakes that we work off by walking and power walking and jogging and all-out running.
Maple syrup is a "sacred residue" that takes a lot of time and labor and fiscal outlay to produce. Yet it all starts as liquid called to life in a tree. Maple syrup is the sweet residue of a long process, not unlike what we might experience at year’s end, not unlike that "distilled sweetness" entering the heart in Seamus Heaney’s "… Dream of Solstice."
Like somebody who sees things when he’s dreaming
And after the dream lives with the aftermath
Of what he felt, no other trace remaining.So I live now, for what I saw departs
And is almost lost, although a distilled sweetness
Still drops from it into my inner heart.The distilled sweetness, the sacred residue, is what’s left after it all.
What is the sacred residue of our year? What are we left with after the needles on our Christmas tree have grown brittle and dry and fall with alarming rapidity to the floor? What are we left with after the shopping is over, the gifts wrapped and unwrapped, and, if we are fortunate enough to be among the well-fed, the remnants of Christmas Dinner are there for the picking on the sagging shelves of the refrigerator? What are we left with after the anticipation of the holidays has collapsed into a sometimes crying heap at bedtime or distilled into a wave of hollow spirits as we sit at last over a leisurely cup of tea? What are we left with at the end of a year that has meant so many different things for each of us here this morning? And what are we left with as we go forth to wrap our scarves more snuggly beneath our chins and hunker down as the wind whips through the canyons of the city as if to announce that winter isn’t fooling after all?
Maybe we are called to join Fredrick Zydek, author of our morning’s reading, and pray into the stillness. Maybe we need to gather ourselves "into the basket of [our] skin." Perhaps it is time to "listen to the wind moving its divine puzzle in and around [us]." We can "become aware that [we] are [observers] to these events, [sojourners] daring to enter the quiet slopes that lead to silence."
Maybe we’re unwrapping that last and most precious gift of the season, a simple noticing of space and silence.
One must have a mind of winter
mused the poet Wallace Stevens,
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.Listening in the snow. Snow or no snow, wind or no wind, we can listen into the silence. There is something about a winter’s night, the colder the better, for the wind chill promises far more stars there for the gazing, even here in the city. There is something about a winter’s night that leaves us with the essentials–space, time, silence.
Stretching out in the snow was a pleasure relished by the late Philip Simmons. It allowed him to empty out, just to empty out and move into what he called "winter mind."
"To be of winter mind," wrote Simmons, "is to be so empty of preconception as to hear without judgment and thus to hear in that wind neither misery nor happiness….Lying in the snow, I let my body cool, my breath slow, my mind empty of thoughts…. At this moment of merging, one emptiness beholds another emptiness not different from itself. All separateness falls away, and I am one with snow and stars, rooted as pine, imperturbable as stone."
When was the last time you made an angel in the snow and then stopped flapping your wings long enough to look up? I have no idea how playful the angels of Christmas might have been, but in my willful imagination, I hope that they took a few moments out to stretch in the snow, casting images of themselves. And doing so, I trust that they smiled knowing that this was peace on earth.
"The world in solemn stillness lay to hear the angels sing."
goes the carol.
How else would we hear them sing? In solemn stillness, winter mind becomes winter mindfulness.
There is a paradox here. In solemn stillness, in emptying out, we are visited by the most extraordinary of gifts. Such is the case with John Luther Adams, a composer who has chosen to live in the sub-Arctic region near Fairbanks, Alaska. At winter solstice in this part of the world, the temperature drops frequently to 50 degrees below zero. Here in the solemn stillness of this bone numbing winter, where the dark stretches into seasons and the moonlit whiteness approximates infinity, here it is that Adams draws his inspiration.
"Is it somehow possible to live and work in that timeless intersection between endings and beginnings?" It is a question Adams poses at New Year’s time. He continues:
"Much of my composition In the White Silence is composed of continuously rising and falling lines, layered and diffused into an allover texture of frozen counterpoint… Now, in a new piece, I’m trying…to let go of line and figuration altogether. But what will be left?"
"For me," he muses, "composing is not about finding the notes. It’s about losing them. …. knowing what to write down is not the most difficult thing. It’s knowing what not to write down… "
What’s left is his music, echoing affirmation of how possible, how viable it is "to live and work in that timeless intersection between endings and beginnings." Such is the stuff of solemn stillness.
We’re on the threshold of a new year. Yet we’re not. We’re balancing, each of us in utmost fragility, in a timeless intersection of endings and beginnings. We’re somewhere and nowhere and everywhere. We’re at now and then and already we’re into the next moment, the next year of what we know as our lives. How do we savor the winter of our souls and find warmth in the chill itself? How do we relish the dark of this season, so that when the stars come out we will see them? And yes, how do we take one more step in the blizzard conditions of our world, daring to believe that peace is possible, daring to hope that the message of peace on earth, good will to all is something more than a seasonal illusion?
...The seasons of the soul …
Bring to each of us a different experience of these
Days of Christmastime and Solstice.In the days after Christmas, just on the other side of the Winter Solstice, I am left with a floating melancholy. My pace has been rapid, intense even. My life has been full, brimming even. What’s left, I ask? What’s left? It’s time for my winter mind to become winter mindfulness. It’s time to let go, to know what notes to leave out, to know that not all the sap that flows is necessary or desirable for what my end product will be, to know enough to let the year pass away as the white crystals of Christmas Day melt beneath our feet. Melancholy has ripened into reflection. Reflection has mellowed into reverie, and reverie stretches into faith in renewal. It is that cyclical renewal affirmed by nature itself deciding to be born again, with an increasing span of light day by day. It is that cyclical renewal affirmed by our knowledge of daffodils and lilacs taking shape in the soil beneath us. It is the cyclical renewal of pregnant silence giving birth to the songs of spring and pregnant space becoming permeable to flora and fauna. This renewal of nature reminds me that I myself am renewed, for I am composed of natural ingredients.
This "Renewal of Nature" is the very topic addressed by Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and his colleague, Isabelle Stengers, in the concluding paragraphs of their remarkable work, Order Out of Chaos.
...the ideas of instability, of fluctuation–diffuse into the social sciences. We know now that societies are immensely complex systems involving a potentially enormous number of bifurcations exemplified by the variety of cultures that have evolved in the relatively short span of human history. We know that such systems are highly sensitive to fluctuations. This leads both to hope and a threat: hope, since even small fluctuations may grow and change the overall structure. As a result, individual activity is not doomed to insignificance. On the other hand, this is also a threat, since in our universe the security of stable, permanent rules seems gone forever. We are living in a dangerous and uncertain world that inspires no blind confidence, but perhaps only the same feeling of qualified hope [italics mine] that some Talmudic texts appear to have attributed to the God of Genesis:
And they proceed to quote from such a text (A. Neher, "Vision du temps et de l’histoire dans la culture juive,’ Les cultures et le temps, Paris: Payot, 1975, p. 179.)
"Twenty-six attempts preceded the present genesis, all of which were destined to fail. The world of man has arisen out of the chaotic heart of the preceding debris; he too is exposed to the risk of failure, and the return to nothing. ‘Let’s hope it works’…exclaimed God as he created the World, and this hope, which has accompanied all the subsequent history of the world and mankind, has emphasized right from the outset that this history is branded with the mark of radical uncertainty."
What we are left with is the feeling of qualified hope amid radical uncertainty. It is the unfolding mystery that we inhabit in the realm of a Creator who may well have exclaimed, "Let’s hope it works!" We are left with one another and the variations of good will and otherwise that fuel our psyches and souls. We are left with the world that we so daringly call nature as if we weren’t part of it. We are, like the composer in the sub-Arctic regions, left with the stillness, with the wondrous empty silences, of winter.
Only days ago I received yet another letter, this one from friends I have known for decades. Though they have each wrestled with illness throughout this past year, they are day by day witness to the wonders that define life on their farm in the Berkshires. Like that earlier letter from my cousin, Ann, their greeting too compelled a moratorium on reading further, for it contained the sacred residue of a year fully lived, the distilled sweetness of friendship renewed, and the spirit of Christmas calling us once more to the possibility of peace on earth.
Their words ring out with the exuberance of song:
"We pray that your Holiday Season will overflow with long intervals of peace and joy, good fellowship and good cheer! And may each of us be given the grace and courage to celebrate boldly the abundance of beauty, to extend generous hospitality, and to stubbornly rejoice in the wonders of life."
May each of us here this morning know that "grace and courage to celebrate boldly the abundance of beauty," to extend hospitality far and wide and nearby, and to stubbornly, oh so stubbornly, rejoice in the wonders of life. From this comes the assurance that peace is possible. In the solemn stillness of winter, may we hear this song. At the end of a year that has passed away, this is the gift of what ‘s left.
Amen.
Sources:
John Luther Adams, "Winter Music: A Composer’s Journal," Music-Works, No. 82. Reprinted by permission in The Best Spiritual Writing 2002, Edited by Philip Zaleski, HarperCollins, 2002, 1-21.
Alicia S. Carpenter, "A Promise through the Ages Rings" (words), Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Boston, 1993, 344.
Seamus Heaney, "A Dream of Solstice" — First published in The Kenyon Review, Winter 2001. Reprinted by permission in The Best Spiritual Writing 2002, Edited by Philip Zaleski, HarperCollins, 2002, 85.
Noel Perrin, Amateur Sugar Maker, (20th Anniversary Edition), University Press of New England, 1972.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New Science Library, Shambhala/Boulder & London, 1984. 312-13.
Philip Simmons, "Winter Mind," UUWorld, January/February 2001, 32-37.
Wallace Stevens, "The Snow Man," fromCollected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1954.
Fredrick Zydek, "Praying Into the Stillness," The Other Side, November and December, 2002, 14.
http://wwww.hamline.edu/lupus/archive-s/msg00527.html
http://www.johnlutheradams.com/biography/index.html
http://www.maplemuseum.com/history.html
http://www.massmaple.org/history.html
http://www.ohioline.osu.edu/b856/b856_37.html
http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1723
http://www.statpub.com/stat/open/0rv3rsy.html
http://www.uua.org/world/2002/06/memoriam.html
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