I
am a person particularly affected by sunlight, aware of a shift in my body and mood that coincides with the shift back to Standard Time in late fall. Introspective in the darker season, I engage in my inward stretch more than in than my outward reach. I seem to sit on ideas in winter and hatch them in spring.
Walking home in the dark last evening, I found myself thinking rather vaguely about projects I am gestating, enjoying this amorphous moment in my own creative process, experiencing my internal rhythm as synchronistic with our sacred calendar. We’re a week and more into Kislev, our darkest month. The proportion of darkness to light will continue to rise until the winter solstice, which will occur during Hanukkah. Then the tide will turn and our daylight hours will begin to increase again.
The name of our month shares a Hebrew root with a biblical word for trust – “kislah.” I like to think that during Kislev we are invited to trust that just as our babies develop in our dark and fertile wombs, so, too, our thoughts and innovations incubate in our generative interior selves. We are not privy to what is germinating in us but we trust it will emerge whole and healthy. Our dark month can prompt us to cultivate patience with the maturation of a formative spark as it goes underground and roots in the rich dark of the subconscious where we seek solutions in privacy even from ourselves.
Our “kislah” is trust in the miraculous way we continuously nourish ideas we cannot yet articulate, until our ideas and strategies are ready to reveal themselves as shaped products of our ingenuity. That’s when they come to light.
In this particular moment of Ferguson’s grand jury decision, terror during the prayer at Har Nof, ISIS slaughter of innocents, and the vandalizing of the Max Rayne Hand in Hand school, I’ve been feeling the tug of hopelessness. Darkness of a sinister sort is brewing in our world and I am unable to imagine how I can make a difference. I think I would fall to despair if I did not trust that somewhere beneath my surface good and divinely inspired ideas for tikkun olam are constantly brewing.
Living these darkening weeks aware that I associate darkness with the fertile unknown that holds potential for all possibilities helps me remember the merit of equanimity; innovations take time to coalesce and emerge. Living Kislev as if it was a pregnancy is helping me to trust that I am gestating answers perpetually nourished by the stream of divine light indwelling within me, and to trust that light is, miraculously, always growing in my darkness.
Kislev
Pronounced: KISS-lev, Origin: Hebrew, Jewish month usually coinciding with November-December.
tikkun olam
Pronounced: teeKOON oh-LAHM (oo as in boot), Origin: Hebrew, literally “repair of the world,” used for a range of social justice efforts.
