Lighting the Bonfire of Your Imagination

We have survived the longest night of the year—again. Many people still light bonfires on Winter Solstice night. Bring greens in the house to encourage the sun to return. Light candles. Put lights on the evergreen trees. They’re waiting upon the darkness.

This is an act of the imagination. Imagination and the symbol generating capacity of the psyche are inextricably related in a way I’m still trying to understand. Someone postulated that it wasn’t an opposable thumb, and therefore tool-making ability, that led to human development, but our capacity to make symbols. I think that capacity emerged from our visual, pre-verbal experiencing of the world.  I see a tree, though I have no word for it. It has fruit. Limbs I can climb to escape a predator. Without words, I see the tree and come to associate it with food and safety. This was the arising of symbolic thinking.

In the spirit of the bonfires burning to wait upon the dark last night, we can also set a fire to light our imaginations. I’ve been a writer since the second grade, but only in the last four years have my imaginative abilities truly taken flight. And I know why. I began to record and watch my dreams.

Dreams arise out of the dark, out of that pre-verbal symbol making place in our psyche. Dreams are pure metaphor. Gob-smackingly original. As I watched my dreams and saw over time how the symbols and metaphors developed, my ability to think metaphorically grew exponentially. It was set on fire. I was exercising the fundamental “muscle” where all writing arises from—all poetry, fairy tales, myth, and story. 

I am perpetually awed at the abundance and richness going on way down deep. How much I had missed before I began paying attention. Dreams and myth are hard to understand—at first. The language of symbol and metaphor is really a foreign language to our conscious, rational minds. Like any foreign language, it has to be learned. If any artist, any person, takes the time to learn this language, to wait upon the long dark night, I promise that your imagination will blaze bonfire bright. 

“If you wait upon the silence, it is not silent. 

And when you wait upon the darkness, it is luminous.” 

--CG Jung. Collected Works Volume 17

7:30 BELLS: The Radiance of Rain

Rain, sun, wind, clouds—then rain again. In other words, we’re having weather here at the river. Inside, evergreen boughs and shining Christmas trees echo ancient traditions of winter solstice—they encourage the sun to turn, to return, to please please hurry back to those starved for light.

Outside, on my walk during a sun beak, each tree is jeweled with raindrops. Maybe this inspired the idea for Christmas tree lights, but the trees and the rain knew it first.

I once thought of higher spiritual ideas as jewels that existed “up there.” We had to work hard to get to them. Climb ladders of theology, follow stone-inscribed precepts, fast ten thousand days in the wilderness, read every spiritual text. But in the ringing radiance of rain on the branches, I know I was wrong.

Wind has taken its toll in the woods. Many branches twist on the ground. I see broken limbs, split trunks, trampled leaves. But every piece of green, not only those in the high treetops, is jeweled with raindrops. The imperfect, the fallen, the broken—we're all radiant.

The jewels lay on every part of our lives, every part of ourselves that has been broken, beaten, every part wounded or scarred. They even shine on the mundane of dirty dishes and downloads that fill so much of our lives. We just have to see them. Pick them up, turn them in our hand. Maybe we don’t know right away what they mean. But keep collecting them, keep fingering them in your pocket until you do.

Outside, I knew the weather was changing again when the wind rose. The trees danced alive, showering drops of jeweled rain to the grass, to the leaves, the weeds, the indomitable cherry tree already budding.

And that’s how I’d like to be. And that’s what I’d like to do.

Welcome, winter solstice.

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.

7:30 BELLS Guest Posts run on the second Tuesday of every month. Join me on January 12 for a guest post with children's book author Erik Brooks.

7:30 BELLS: Winter is a Phoenix that Rises in Spring

Only days from winter solstice, I huddle near the bonfire. Here in the country, no yard waste truck weekly whisks away a sedate container of leaves. Acres of trees wantonly toss their leaves on our property. And even moderate winds bring down branches. So we rake and we rake and we endlessly rake. And light bonfires in autumn and winter.

Like this one. With dark falling at 4:00, the molten gold embers hold my eye. Then the beauty of the lacy ash. The wood being consumed.

Our life being lived and consumed creates our own circling seasons of fire, ash, and fire again. Living is combustion. We are the fuel. Poet Wendell Berry wrote, “Practice Resurrection.” And I think, stepping nearer the bonfire, what is winter but a phoenix that rises in spring? Every spring.

Even so, come winter solstice, come soon.

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.

7:30 BELLS Guest Posts run on the second Tuesday of every month. Join me on January 12 for a guest post with children's book author Erik Brooks.

7:30 BELLS: Starfall on Waterfall

At night, I sit outside ringing at the wonder of this waterfall in a friend’s yard. Sunlight collected by solar panels shines on the dark water. What does the sunlight think, finding itself shining again in darkness? Is it like coming home again? Being reborn? After all, sunlight is born from a burning ball in this immense, dark universe.

The play of light on the water enchants me—watch the video. What is the light that falls, and what is the light that rises? What is the darkness that falls, and what the darkness that rises? I don’t know. 

I only know that now, a week from the winter solstice, I am wild for light, any light. I feel like an immense dark universe. I take courage from the sun illuminating this night waterfall. Here is the sun’s chance to make something else a star. How can I capture whatever light I hold and shine it back onto the world? How can I be starfall on a waterfall?

Ring out, bells, ring!

Happy Solstice to all.

7:30 BELLS Posts run every Tuesday.

7:30 BELLS Guest Posts run on the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month. Join me on December 23 for a guest post with author Holly Schindler.

7:30 BELLS: Chisels of Light

On the Winter Solstice, the sun filtered through my curtains, sculpting the light. Usually, when fall darkness descends, I start counting the days until December 21. I long for the Return of Light.

My bipolar brain chemistry makes me exquisitely sensitive to seasonal shifts in light and dark. I was born for summer. I come alive. Bloom. Creativity dances from my fingertips. How the bells ring! In the winter, I use a dawn simulator to cajole my bio-rhythms. Winter has always been something to be endured.

But this winter has been different. Somehow I’ve embraced it. Somehow I’ve learned that the bells ring in many different ways. The quiet ringing of a snowfall. The considered ringing of a sodden, cloud-shot sky. The elegant ringing of tree-bones against twilight.

In these dark days, I am tuned to anything that sculpts the light. Like poems. Stories. Art. Music. Kindness. Maybe, winter itself is nothing but a great sculptor of the light. Maybe that’s why at last I’m able to embrace it, take up the chisel of light, and ring.

Closing with this stanza from Tennyson:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

LORE OF THE BELL

Take up the chisel of light and ring.