WINTER

In Chinese medicine Winter represents the WATER PHASE and corresponds with our kidneys, the emotion of fear, the color blue-black, our will power, darkness, depth, death and dying, essence, our souls, and the root source of our existence. Poetry that nourishes the soul of our Water elements is filled with the correspondences of winter and the Water Phase.

REST OF LONGING:

        I wrote Rest of Longing sometime in my late twenties when I was head-deep in psychotherapy and dying to all I had known in my life up to that time. Through these dark corridors of my psyche I developed a loving trust and respect for the dark. I experienced first-hand how my past wounds had created a fog and a barrier to a radical and raw experience of deep joy.
        Therapy was a process of unraveling and undoing the encrustations around my heart. Going into the darkness whole-heartedly I penetrated down to the very core of my being, to my original essence. I experienced the sun in the center of my heart and deep in my belly, obscured only by the painful clouds of conditioning and fear. Going into these deep places in therapy and in poems was a total cleaning house. My whole life, especially the apparent short-comings and disasters, were reconciled in this deep journey.
        A full-hearted entry into our darkness births an indefatigable light. In this way, nothing is left behind. We are not crusty, our defenses loosen, and the passion of our burning hearts burns brighter and more visibly. We become fully alive, in agony and in glory, in strength and in weakness. These seemingly polar qualities become one in the potent emanation of our presence.
        Rest of Longing represents the darkness, death, and hopelessness (usually temporary, though we may not feel this way at the time) of the Winter season to which we must surrender ourselves in order to birth the already present light in the center of our hearts—the summer hidden in winter. This poem also conveys the faith that is born of the courage and trust to nakedly enter the dark of winter, or at least the willingness to be swiftly disrobed by it!
        It is easy to have faith and gratitude in goodness, what we know, and getting what we want. But the willingness to be utterly dismantled without light or might in sight and choicelessly resurrected from this place grows another sort of faith and love entirely.
        Rest of Longing is a prayer and homage to the blessed light that guides us into and miraculously returns us from the sacred night, as effortlessly as we give ourselves to sleep each night and as miraculously as we wake up each morning.
        Rest of Longing is part of the “Healing Poem Cards” series and is also available in calligraphy as Poetry-Art.

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*Poems marked with a "G" after their title are available as greeting cards.
Poems marked with an "A" are available as original calligraphy art pieces.