Where’s the Calvary?

I stop by a friend’s house with some cookies, and we talk for a few moments on her back porch. Sunlight streams in through the windows, rare and cherished in December.

Driven more by the solstice than the calendar, this time of year is the time of reckoning: what’s happened, what’s lying fallow, what might emerge next year? 2023 was a year in my immediate world of wildfire smoke, of floods and more floods, of a social fabric thinning with half-truths and deception and irascibility. A year of people around me who suffered losses in ways that matter immeasurably.

The world we’ve created drives us to reduction, to categorizing our lives in an Instagram post, a hashtag. For anyone who’s even remotely following our personal or national stories, the facts align otherwise. History may likely prove that the precipice of 2024 was a still moment before a tsunami. A handful of years ago, on a sunny autumn afternoon, I faced a still point in my life when I realized the cavalry I’d relied upon to get me out of a marriage gone sour was not saddling up and heading my way. In what was really no joke, I sized up my assets, secured my perimeter, and penned myself a map to head out for new territory. I was, in fact, my own cavalry. Fresh horses arrived, thankfully, at key places. What surprised me the most was the generosity of strangers who, in passing, offered me small precious things like swallows of magic elixirs.

Here’s the thing: in my way of thinking, December is the holy month because of its deep darkness, utterly mysterious, profoundly unknowable, utterly unnegotiable, sometimes terrifying. It’s the season to open our hearts beyond that reduction. On her porch, the cold gnawed my hands holding those cookies. As we spoke, I thought of the songbirds that flock around this house in summer. We are the cavalry, in ways we often don’t rationalize or consider. Perhaps this is the dearest part of December: that in the darkness that transcends any human doing, our eyes are always searching for the moon and starlight, for luminosity. And the light is always there.