Na hÁiteanna Caola

My morning hike on the eve of the winter solstice begins just as the sun emerges above the horizon at 7: 53 am and by the time I arrive home it feels like the day is fully here and just as quickly shortly before 5:00 pm, the sun is gone on the shortest day of the year. Dawn and Dusk, that time sandwiched between night and day; darkness and light. This is the liminal space that nature offers up daily.

I have not always been interested in liminal spaces, in fact, this is a word that I have not been familiar with for most of my life, but it is something that has drawn me. The rhythm of the natural world daily and seasonally resonates with me as one who spends their days in nature. Just as planting and harvesting follows the seasons, our lives and rituals do as well.

Mom passed a year ago on December 21, within hours of the winter solstice, a thin time in Celtic culture when the boundary between heaven and earth opens, a period of transitions between life and death, fall and winter, endings and beginnings.

Poetry as does nature, helps me touch the liminal. As Leonard Cohen witnesses’ daybreak in Anthem, “the birds they sang, at the break of day, start again”, ending with his cry for hope that in the darkness, “there is crack, a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in”. And poet Alfred Tennyson, drawing on nature, in his elegiac poem “Crossing the Bar”, his wish was to cross the bar to meet his “Pilot face to face” as the “sunset and evening star” and “the twilight and evening bell” and wished that there “may be no sadness of farewell”.

In this thin place, a year later, when darkness prevails, I know that in my heart that you are in the light.