Winter Solstice

I wrote this on Winter Solstice and couldn't bring myself to share it at the time, but am publishing it now, as a record of a stormy day. 

It is Winter Solstice and I am stormy. 

I have been on the edge of anger all day, experiencing small frustration after medium frustration, all of it compounding to cast a black shadow over my mood. It appeared for a moment that the clouds were going to lift when I put on some sensible shoes and took my stormy self out for a walk around the neighbourhood. The light exercise did me good and I love seeing clouds hover over and against the water. I even encountered an improbably happy family out for a walk: mum, dad and baby all under umbrellas, with baby girl's feet bare and happy in the shallow puddles. Still, despite this momentary clearing, after French class, the rain came. Tears (shocker) arrived to end a tempestuous day, not cleansing, but clogging my nose and face. 

I had a conversation earlier this week in which a friend casually dismissed ease as a component of a good life. I bit my tongue at that moment, but I wanted to yell that a life without some - just some - ease is not one I want to be living. My life seems impossibly bent towards the hard at the moment. End-of-term work is hard. Moving from housing stability to instability is hard. French class is hard. Conversations with friends are skewed towards hard. I don't feel capable of handling it. I want something, anything, in a crevice of my life to be easy. I want to ease into some small aspect and say, yes, I can rest here. I find myself bruised from bumping up against hard edges all day. 

Madeleine L'Engle has been on my mind today. Yes, because of that famous first line and the weather and my mood. But also because of her advice on combatting the dark in A Circle of Quiet. She writes that she is afraid of the dark and that this is a natural, even healthy response to this ordinary, yet unknowable phenomenon. But to counter the dark, she writes, we must light candles. She offers prayer and love up as examples. Nice ideas, I've thought this week. But every time I've gone to 'light a candle' of prayer or hope or twenty minutes of quiet to myself, something comes along to blow it out and I am left once again in the dark, tormented by the faint scent of hope or love, with all the promise of their light snatched away.

It is Winter Solstice and it is dark. The light has been snatched away.