Carla Jay Harris | The Beginning
Find an audio reading of this Black Eyed Story above.
Let me start with a poem. Trust me, it’s worth it. It’s by Jane Kenyon, a beautiful poet who would be gone too soon (and who knew it). And no one knows light and darkness better than those with one foot out the door.
The terminally-diagnosed and the long-aged know all about advent, what it means to be still but approaching, waiting yet arriving. Whenever I find Kenyon’s words whispering from a page, I know I’ll be glad to have listened. So shall we?
Taking Down the Tree
by Jane Kenyon
"Give me some light!" cries Hamlet's
uncle midway through the murder
of Gonzago. "Light! Light!" cry scattering
courtesans. Here, as in Denmark,
it's dark at four, and even the moon
shines with only half a heart.The ornaments go down into the box:
the silver spaniel, My Darling
on its collar, from Mother's childhood
in Illinois; the balsa jumping jack
my brother and I fought over,
pulling limb from limb. Mother
drew it together again with thread
while I watched, feeling depraved
at the age of ten.With something more than caution
I handle them, and the lights, with their
tin star-shaped reflectors, brought along
from house to house, their pasteboard
toy suitcases increasingly flimsy.
Tick, tick, the desiccated needles drop.By suppertime all that remains is the scent
of balsam fir. If it's darkness
we're having, let it be extravagant.
Did you know that on a moonless night, if you travel away to a field, far from city lights,
you can see how surrounded we are by the heavens?
Well, here we are folks, at the end of the hustle and bustle, the end of the flurry of stillness that is advent – particularly if you have lil’ ones. But everything that rises must fall – even our spirits.
I have always liked endings because they mark the beginning of something new arriving. It’s never mattered to me if the new thing coming was unknown, yet-to-be-determined. If it’s the arrival of a stranger, mysterious and alien, all the better. Let the new be a blank page and I’ll get my paint brushes. Let it be unknown territory and I’ll plant a garden. It’s the knowing what’s ahead that I dread. Like Jeremiah, I’d be a weeping prophet.
There’s no sadness in me when a season passes. I’ve been known to snatch the whip from Father Time, give it a deafening crack and cry, “Onward,” to the team of days pulling the sleigh. I missed my entire 46th year erroneously spending the previous 365 days celebrating being 47. “If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant,” Kenyon wrote, and I say “Hear! Hear!”
But not all of us like shifting winds. Max weeped throughout their whole kindergarten graduation. There was no comfort for them in our assurance that they would return to school in the fall. Through their tears, they asked, “The fall? What’s that?” The word “fall” didn’t sound promising. Every last day of school thereafter was a funeral march for them with a deep period of true grief. Christmas was no different. Any end was a doom dungeon, making all beginnings usurpers and disruptors of the comfort of routine.
The end of advent is a whopper of an ending. We wait and wait and wait and then… BLAM! It’s Christmas Day, which ends rather abruptly no more than a week later with us extinguishing the light we were waiting for. We douse the light from trees, mantles, and tabletops. We idle, foot on brake, waiting to usher in the new year. No sooner than the light turns green, we punch the gas. It’s time to begin again.
Which is how it must be. We cannot stay in the manger basking beneath the light of one bright star forever. Morning is coming followed by a lesser night. We must content ourselves with dimmer, darker stars. But did you know that on a moonless night, if you travel away to a field, far from city lights, you can see how surrounded we are by the heavens? Not one bright star but thousands and thousands join us nightly and sing. You cannot imagine such a choir!
If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.
If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.
—Jane Kenyon
I wanna bookend a cancer-diagnosed Kenyon with the voice of the beautiful and long-aged May Sarton. This is from her book, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year. Let us listen to what this matriarch of the written word said:
I've been thinking about happiness—how wrong it is ever to expect it to last or there to be a time of happiness. It's not that. It's a moment of happiness. Almost every day containing at least one moment of happiness.
Advent reminds us that we are not the light. We are extravagant darkness—the backdrop waiting for the twinkling, swinging, shooting, and singing stars. Our finite days of tears, worries, disappointments, despair, and mundane everydayness full of endings is just a container—a widescreen sky—big enough to hold all the flickering, scintillating, shiny moments of happiness, starbursts of new beginnings.
As far as I know, the shepherds never returned to the manger – nor did the wise men. The moment of happiness ended and they all had to begin anew, traveling back into the filtered light of ordinary days and starless nights. But they took with them the memory of wondrous angels and Mary and Joseph and Jesus. A moment of great joy.
One moment of happiness makes a good story but not a full life.
I imagine the very next day, the shepherds, wise men, Joseph, Jesus, Mary, the animals and even the angels had to get on with things – as do we. What a common and very human story they left for us – as common and as human as the stories we live full of wonder but mostly full of everyday living with a bit of puttering and pondering over the meaning of this moment and that.
Just as Mary did.
Turns out we’re not so different than the Blessed Mother. We’re no less human. Perhaps this is why her story is still told. We’ve all given birth to something that we didn’t understand. We’ve all had something mysterious impregnate us, something that has felt greater than ourselves, wholly divine. And we’ve just had to go with it. Birth it and see what happens. And like Mary, we may live our whole lives pondering this new thing that happened to us and we may never fully understand it. Still, we love it unconditionally as only a mother could.
May your days from here until we meet again next year contain at least one moment of happiness. But if it’s darkness you’re having, may it be extravagant – as extravagant as stars singing in a moonless sky.
*Black Eyed Stories Will Be Back Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Oh The stars 🌟. Lots of Love Marcie. Thank you fir the moments when my heart stilled from racing wuth catastrophic thoughts and I got to ponder. To cry. To smile. To love my way back into the world again & again via your words. 💜🌟💔🙏💜
Beautiful, thank you. Just beautiful.