This piece was improvised into being around the winter Solstice, and as the tempestuousness of early spring arouses us it feels like the moment to share it. I’ve written out the words below but I highly recommend watching the live recording of the poem coming into being, held in a bed of sound by Krivo Flores on base mandolin and Robin Jackson on clarinet.
I’m reminded of the words of the ones who turned hardship into what we call the Blues, began with some version of “It's been a long cold dark lonely winter.” I’m reminded of the words of the ones who learned how to sing when there were no words to describe how hard it was trying to be human in a world confused. Something about “Here comes the sun,” and though we, for as long as we’ve been human, have worshiped the one who shines in the sky above, there is another layer of loving. Loving the places, Loving the places where the sun only comes sometimes; where light has to be sought, and reflected, and we remember again and again that we can only see stars because it is so dark. Every culture intact has a version of this story. The vast dark full of lights is where we come from, when our loved ones die that’s where they go, and if you and I and they are made of the self-same stardust held together by gravity, which is also love; if we remember the force that causes seeds to shatter so saplings may rise: we could call it joy, we could call it promise, we could simply call it life living life insisting not that light is better than dark but that one only exists because the other and the spiral the spiral in which we are woven the spiral that is we woven… The word enlightenment, not some intellectual exercise that you get a certificate for reaching, not a pyramid scheme that you could coach another coach that could coach another coach into enlightenment, but the process of allowing light into our cells. DNA is a mirror to reflect back to life the light that only life provides through us in us as us. As we become human. Birth is only possible because of death. We only know to live fully because we know we are going to die. Every spring, every morning, we have an opportunity to celebrate the dark that has been and will be; and to listen, and breathe, and feel and reach. To shatter our shells, and rise again and rise again and rise again.