Advent 2011

Marianne Worcester

--------------

This is the season of impossibles: impossible lineups, impossible traffic, impossible deadlines, the impossible expectations I place on myself, impossible dreams of a consumer paradise available to so impossibly few. This season tugs at me like no other, swings me from pole to pole in all my unresolved places, in the perfectionism that flows down the motherline; in the seasonal lethargy that would have me curl up and sleep through February, glands call out to the dying of the light. Yet here I am in bleak December, stalled in traffic, lined up at the Bay, aproned in the kitchen with persimmons and an impossible recipe. When suddenly the thought comes that I am a child, still, a child at large in the universe. I get in my car and drive to the beach at dusk, hurrying to catch the last of the solstice light over English Bay. All is calm here along the edge, just the familiar sussuration of the incoming tide, the homely twitter of widgeons bobbing in the kelp. I walk along the shore in the gathering gloom, walk as one without hurry, without hope, a tired middle-aged woman wanting to remember her place in the scheme of things, where life is plain and unpretentious, where the wetlands has gone humbly to winter. In this impossibly tender time, a heron rises from the pond on wings of swaddling linen. A hooded merganser pair separate from the wall of broken reeds and pass by soundlessly where I stand among the blackened bramble, the red osier dogwood, the sedges, black cottonwoods, spruce and hemlock. Now I hear it, the swamp, breathing. Then it comes to me how we are all in a stable, breathing and huddled around a manger, our vulnerable bodies pressed together for warmth, munching, pairing, pushing and shoving, mostly unaware that this is the narrowest of ways and these are the great gifts of Earth, Air, Light, and Water all around, underfoot, unnoticed, unopened. When I turn to look at the city, it stands caught in the sun's final ray, glowing like a holy thing, at the end of a year, an epoch. At this edge of the continent, a possible birth in an impossible place, where lie the concealed and cradled gifts, those we haven't asked for, those we don't know we want. A divine parabola arcs across the vast distances, linking sea, wetlands, sky, city as the first star declares the night. Now the imagination moves out to those first sheepless fields where an explosion of Unimaginable Love set everything in motion, a Great Light birthing carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, wave after wave of galactic gift-giving: fluorine, astatine, bromine, cesium, silver, silicon, phosphorus, our universe our galaxy, getting itself born. Now here we are, in this place, and in this time, children of celestial stuff, shimmering still, full of impossible gifts, opening at last.