Exhilarated By the Time I Spent in the Dark
Perhaps resting isn't depressing, after all (and a whole lotta other maybes)
Cold, wet, and grey this early morning, with startstop showers and fluctuating temperatures that broaden the ruts in the long gravel driveway to my home. The same long, gravel driveway that a driver might curse and lament as her truck sways like a drunken boat crossing it, but loses interest in repairing once back inside by the warm wood stove, trying to dehydrate a little.
I heft the crates of full milk jugs inside, having picked them up from my local farmer. Now and again, I communicate with other women about their milk cows: space, time, cost, feed, and what to do with the excess gallons of milk they procure and yet don’t use every day. The story always unfolds like an insatiable mouse with a cookie, and ends up somewhere between milking at o’dark thirty twice a day and expanding my own drove of pigs to feed the surplus.
After reshuffling the entire refrigerator to fit the ten half gallon jars for the week, I put the kettle on and, standing there with my right palm on the counter, crane my neck upwards to watch the driving rain upon the skylights. I sense a delicious movement, my flying upwards as a comet through the drops to a world unknown, but probably without dirty dishes, endless laundry, and unceasing cobweb clearing. No wonder, I consider, my burgeoning humbuggedness over the annual Christmas holidays and my delight at having survived another year of it. The obligations and muzak, not to mention the excessive sugar advertising and consumption (by which we become utterly ill afterwards and blame it on the “flu” instead of an alcohol-cocoa-peppermint-candy glut)…all of this is plopped upon daily living responsibilities already there, and I can’t even get my road repaired on a regular day. I am grateful, of course, profoundly, for the birth of my Savior. I just find Him missing a lot in the chaos the world brings to the season, and am happier sitting at His feet in quieter times of the year.
The kettle whistles me out of reverie. A chai infusion, heavy on the ginger, to further dry my bones and warm up my belly. This time of year I find myself slungshot quite a bit between heady inspiration and debilitating depression. In the course of drinking my mug dry, I will alternate between making lists of all sorts (garden plans, lessons to teach, new cooking techniques, items to send off to charities, areas to repair, people to contact, articles to write, places to go, recorded conferences to listen to, kids’ closets to declutter…) and scrunching them all up laughing at how, now, milking a dairy cow in the mud would take less time and trouble.
The six year old pads into the kitchen, halfway between sleepwalking and damning the torpedoes for full steam ahead. I run my fingers through his curly dark hair, his head and breathing heavy on my lap. The rain is still wild, the wind sweeping. A great cleansing, perhaps. A kind of purifying percussion soothing the dormant seeds lying beneath the surface of potholes and overwhelm. Perhaps I need to be resting more, I think, buried under the covers of dormancy and darkness. For the cleansing. Perhaps that’s the point of the cold, wet, and grey.
Maybe resting isn’t depressing. Maybe it is a trusting sort of slumber, and simply allowing the mayhem of the world at large to do its thing with its tantrums and noise during this dark season. Letting it be, as I cannot direct any of it, anyway. Maybe an acknowledgement of this reality, of sorts, would soothe the soul. Maybe I don’t need the lists, today, and certainly can stop considering for five minutes what else I might add to my already full life. I am guessing—hoping?—that like a cheerful daffodil, I will still sprout up in the spring, exhilarated by the time I spent in the dark.
We shall see.
P.S. It’s my first Substack birthday! Thank you to all of my readers, both new and faithful. If you haven’t yet subscribed, won’t you let me know you’re here?