how i nurture my mothering spirit – peg

Befriending the Darkness

The winter had never seemed so long or dark to me until our oldest child entered the world of high school swimming.

From November through January, we arose at 4:30 am three days a week for morning practice. My husband teaches at the school, so while he prepared for his day and Michael ate breakfast, I packed lunches and snacks. By 5:15 am, they bundled themselves and their books, swim gear, and lunches into the car and set out in the cold and dark.

Occasionally I would go back to bed until the next wave of activity with our other two children, but most often the silence beckoned.

I’m not really a morning person, but having to be up created an opportunity for the contemplative solitude that I relish. I poured a cup of coffee, picked up the psalms and my journal, and sat down in our living room, turning the club chair around to look east out of the picture window.

This ritual soon became akin to slipping into a hot bath, a luxurious time to savor. Eventually I turn a lamp on low to read scripture and write, but always I begin with the enveloping darkness.

Michael’s swimming days are now past, but the practice of morning darkness continues as my mainstay of self-care while parenting teens. 

Their lives are very busy with homework, extracurricular commitments, friends, family, etc. Such competing demands create periodic stress and require my help in myriad ways, often on short notice, from running errands for project supplies and library books, to delivering forgotten items to school, to taking up the slack on chores. Depending on the day, these mundane tasks seem more or less burdensome, but I know that doing them conveys love in a language that teenagers understand.

More challenging are the situations for which simple solutions are unavailable, like heartbreak over not getting the part or frustrations with a teacher. It is very difficult to witness your child’s distress and be powerless to affect it.

Tending to these physical and spiritual needs of my teenagers, I’ve learned that the morning darkness is in fact a necessity rather than a luxury. I simply must anchor myself if I am to provide any steadying influence for them.

During any upheaval, the best response for me is to sit in the silent dark and listen for inner wisdom.

When there were tensions in our daughter’s group of friends over plans for an upcoming dance, she felt very hurt by a close friend. Angry text messages were exchanged one evening, jeopardizing the relationship. I maintained relative calm with Kieran, but inside I was seething at this mean girl who had upset my child.

The next morning, ensconced in the nurturing darkness, I could allow the painful emotions to well up, elicit tears, and dissipate into a more rational viewpoint that naturally led into prayers for all the girls.

The light seeps over the horizon, and I’m ready for a new day. 

. . .

Peg Conway is a writer in Cincinnati, Ohio.

She is the author of Embodying the Sacred: A Spiritual Preparation for Birth and blogs about life and faith at pegconway.com.

the winter hill: God speaks in seasons

Every year I try to love winter. A little bit, at least, as much as a Midwesterner ought. I usually fail, flounder by February with dramatic declarations about how much I hate snow and sub-zero temps and skin cracked so dry it bleeds.

But this year I’m trying to be humbled by the cold dark, trying to see what I can learn from stark outlines of bare trees against white skies.

Maybe it’s because I have new views from windows to notice this year, or because the winter has been (mostly) light on snow. But I find myself drawn to the dark lines of the landscape around me, the hills that slowly emerged as leaves blew away last fall.

When we moved here in the spring, the homes around us were hidden behind green trees and lush grass and rows of shrubs. Our new house was tucked into a corner of a hill with woods behind, and I marveled at the soft roll of the land as we walked through the neighborhood. But until winter stripped the yards bare, I didn’t realize how dramatic the hills leapt up around us, how many more I could spy from our upstairs window than I ever imagined when they were hidden in summer’s lush leaves.

At first I felt silly about discovering the hills six months after we moved in. What had I thought was underneath the rising sweep of trees around the road’s bend? But I couldn’t follow the fullness of the line until it was traced white with snow, the hills rolling higher and reaching further than my summer eyes could see.

Every morning now I rise to watch the hills, still surprised to them wrapping around me in this new place I call home.

. . .

I notice God in seasons. The surprise of springtime buds after the long winter, promised and delivered. The lush drench of summer green, fertile and waiting. The burst of autumn leaves, brilliant and fleeting. The hushed blanket of winter snow, stilling and silencing.

I find that God speaks differently as the seasons turn. However I feel or see or hear God at the time, whether in whispers or in silence, in laughter or in wind, it seems amplified by the world outside and echoed in the land around me. Like the shimmer of a summer lake in the brightness of morning or the cold blue dark of white stars scattered in fall’s night sky. God’s voice becomes warmer or colder, soaked or dry, brightly colored or drabbed in grey.

If I open my eyes, if I pause to look around, I am surprised every single time to find God there, outside as well as within, fuller than I expected.

. . .

Lately as I watch the hills, the words of Wendell Berry sift through my mind:

The hill is like an old woman, all her human obligations met, who sits at work day after day, in a kind of rapt leisure, at an intricate embroidery. She has time for all things. Because she does not expect ever to be finished, she is endlessly patient with details. She perfects flower and leaf, feather and song, adorning the briefest life in great beauty as though it were meant to last forever.

(from MaryAnn McKibben Dana’s Sabbath blog)

I love the image of God as the hill – the old woman resting in pure delight of her craft. Working and waiting. Patient and at peace. Resting in the beauty of the moment around her.

When the world presses in with its frantic whirling, I find stillness and strength in this image of the hills: God’s steady, quiet witness to our lives rolling on around the strong, silent center.

She has time for all things. I wonder if this is what draws my eyes to the hills this winter: a longing for more time, deeper time, fuller time. For a God whose strong silence stills the racing worry of my own heart and mind.

For a God whose depth and width and breadth I can only start to trace when the world around me grows cold and dark.