To Be Sure of the Road, Close Your Eyes and Walk in the Dark

Winter Solstice arrives, and a poem for my mom

By artist Parker Parrella

Happy Solstice my friends! Here in the north, we have reached the longest night. I slept in today - until 8:30 - which is, for me, very late. I hope it’s an omen for the next two weeks — that I might actually get to rest more, and fold deeply into myself, and honor this time of contraction and darkness and reflection and dreaming. I hope that for you too, if that’s at all in the cards for you—that this Winter Solstice, and the new moon in Capricorn coming on December 30th, allow you to wind down and wind inward, to be in suspended animation maybe; to get to think about and honor all you have lived through this last year, and to locate your desires for the year to come. If you would like to read more about this time in the great clockworks, you can revisit the piece I wrote two solstices ago - The Gift of Contraction - and then I wrote last year a little about how I celebrate in The Gods of Winter Retake Their Gorgeous Moody Thrones. The short of it is that I honor the Winter Solstice as the ending/beginning of the year, as a kind of great new moon moment of darkness, where I take the time to plant a seed of hope and faith and love for the next cycle, and I hitch it to the six-month growth arc of the expanding light. I will be doing that tonight — by gathering with friends and speaking our wishes aloud and throwing poppy seeds in to a great a big outdoor solstice fire, watching them spark and watching us spark.

For me, this moment of reflection and intention setting is more clear cut than most years. Because no matter what else happened, this year will always be the year that my mom died. My lioness mom Lynne. And whatever comes next, it will come because of this initiation, and all the changes it is still working in me. About six weeks ago now, on the three month anniversary of her death, I wrote a poem, and I named it for a card that fell out of one of her oracle decks. The card read: ”To be sure of the road, close your eyes and walk in the dark.” At the time, I was fresh off that new moon in Scorpio that came on Samhain. I was steeping in the message I had received from my ancestors on All Soul’s Day, to not be afraid. The results of the election had also just arrived, hitting me and all of us with a very hard and bitter truth. And I just knew it was time to pause and write some of the story while I was still living in it. And to let this strange and sage advice bloom a little more—advice that the moon would give—that there was a way to walk through the world during times of great uncertainty and darkness. The poem is about all of that, and it’s also just a story about me and my mom and her dying, and also her life as a death worker, and the Great Tortoise Spirit, which, you’ll see. I thought of this poem again today, and thought I would share it with you at this ending/beginning—like maybe this poem itself is a seed that could be planted in the solstice dark.

Maybe you have personally gone through something big this year, too, in addition to the maelstrom of change the collective is in. And if that’s the case, I especially honor you as this time of contraction calls you inward, in to the chrysalis of winter, to grieve, or dream, or come apart in some way; to appear to be dormant or fallow, while new life incubates and readies. In some ways, I know, it does not matter what we wish for on the Solstice—what will be will be, because we already are who we are. The caterpillar doesn’t like, wish to become a butterfly. It just knows somehow it’s time to surrender to change, to be transformed, to become what it’s meant to be. But also, it does matter that we mark these thresholds of transition, and that we participate, consciously, in our own becoming. That we actually wish to be ourselves, alive at this time. On the soul level, it matters. Winter solstices seed the enlightenment to come. We can just know now, that we don’t know that whole story of who we are, or what the world is. And without knowing the whole story, we can commit to the adventure of finding out. We can commit to knowing ourselves as well as we can now, and using the limited powers that knowing provides to do things that only we can do. To co-create the world we live in, while that world is co-creating us right back.

Here’s that poem - both to read, and if you want, to see/hear me read — although fair warning, I cry. This is only going out to paid subscribers, but you are welcome to share it with anyone you wish. And thank you, always, for gathering with me here. Sending protection, and power, and love to you and yours.

TO BE SURE OF THE ROAD, CLOSE YOUR EYES AND WALK IN THE DARK
by Mindy Nettifee, for Lynne

I.
My mom would sometimes tell this story of her first assignment
on the job as a hospice chaplain.
She had just gotten to the home of the dying patient,
and she was standing awkwardly in the foyer.
The dying woman and her family were upstairs in a bedroom,
a nurse had let her in and then evaporated to the work of care.
My mom wasn’t sure exactly yet what to do—
should she just head up and get right in there?
Should she wait patiently to be invited? 
Would her presence be an interruption?

Just then there was a noise at the back door.
It had one of the small pet doors, and there was a large tortoise
struggling through it. It turned out to be the family tortoise
that no one had seen for months, come out of hibernation early
because it knew – it knew she was dying. The tortoise was crying, 
small rivers of water were pouring from its eyes. 
My mom called for the nurse, and the nurse came,
and she picked up the tortoise and carried it up the stairs
and placed it in the bed of the dying woman, 
where it mourned and attended to her death.

What the fuck, we used to say, privately.
Or in polite company—how crazy is that?
How did the tortoise know what time it was?
My mom wasn’t trying to teach me anything specific
with this story. It was rather a shorthand between us
for acknowledging the Great Mystery that my mom was maybe
wise enough and respectful enough to not try and solve.
I was young, and not so wise or respectful, so I would
sometimes push her to make meaning of it, to own an intuition,
to tell me something true about dying, but she would decline.

She would say, well, what do you think?
I would say, I think animals are not confused,  
not like we are. And she would nod, and hmm, 
and something else unspoken would pass between us.
And we would leave it there.

II.
My mom’s own dying was a long and tortured process.
A couple different forms of dementia were eating away at her, 
Erasing her language, erasing her adult defenses against 
the world and the raw power of her feelings, transforming her 
into an old dying woman and also back into a child. 
Time twisted and disappeared on her. It disappeared on us, too.
Life became a painful kind of waiting, an unending waiting,
where all we had for company was our powerlessness,  
and these undesirable desires—for her to die, for her not to die.
These indigestible needs. This awful growing up.

But when I visited her in the spring, near our birthdays, 
something had changed. She had gotten sick enough 
she could no longer sustain her anger and grief. 
We laughed and laughed instead, and it was like splashing around 
in a cool fountain on a hot and hungry day; it was like 
getting to dwell, once again, inside the blessing of her love for me.
I returned home sure that we were making the turn toward the end.
It made me cry to know that sure, but when I dropped 
into my heart and searched there, I found one sincere desire left, 
to be there with here when she died.

This desire could only become a wish, not a plan, I knew that.
I knew death could not be planned or timed, tamed or controlled.
And then I remembered the Tortoise. It arrived like a koan. 
It arrived like a timely interruption 
struggling through the backdoor of my mind.
I did what poets do when they are desperate and in love—
I prayed. Not with words, although there were words,
but by piercing my own heart, by breaking it open
and pouring it out to the listening world. 
I prayed with my whole body and whole life to the Great Tortoise Spirit. 

I brought my belly to the ground because I thought It would like that.
I cried holy rivers, because I knew It would like that.
I offered It tea, and vodka, and fresh spring grasses
because it was what I had. 
I asked It, I begged It, to teach me what It knew. 

III.
When two months later, a muscle in my right leg tore,
and my leg gave out and I could no longer walk,
and I was inching around my house, 
and mostly resting and hibernating in bed,
I did not know what was happening.
It was a week later, when my leg still would not heal,
and my mom had spiked a fever, but it strangely made her more lucid.
When my sister put her on the phone with me that night,
my mom was giddy. She told me she would love me forever.
She told me there was this great party that everyone was coming for, 
and when was I going to come? Then, I knew, 
it was time to start making my way to her,
though I had become the Tortoise, so it was difficult and slow.
I struggled to get out of the door of my own house.
I had to be wheeled, crying, through two airports.
When I had to walk I had to walk so slowly, inching really.
But I got to her. The Tortoise got me to her in time. 
I got to hold my mom’s hands and feet,
and sing her over to the other side.

IV.
This is the story of my first assignment as a hospice chaplain,
that I will sometimes tell. I am still not as wise 
or as respectful as my mother, but I am trying. 
I will try to just stand here, awkwardly, in the foyer,
when what I want to do is march right up to the room of your future death.
I want to risk interrupting your life to tell you something true,
something about what love makes possible, what death makes possible,
something that spreads the sentience around.
We all have to have our own epiphanies the hard bright way,
it’s true, but I have to tell you there is a road ahead

you will have to walk completely in the dark,
and I don’t want you to be afraid when it arrives.
I want to have built this small door in the back of your mind,
and I want it to open at just the right moment. 
You are an animal, too.
You don’t need to be confused.
Just close your eyes and breathe.
Feel your feet. Feel the path opening beneath your feet.
Feel your heart—the light of the soul is anchored in the heart.
Then slowly step forward, into the unknown, still expanding world.