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[Prompt: Darkness and light as a struggle or gift. Posted on this Winter's Solstice.]

Your days-old eyes first trying to take in a world that was not the warm dark belly of mother, where the only light was the faint blood red silhouette of her taught skin, and even then, without context, what were you even seeing? A faint glimmer of gold from the midwife’s lamp revealing pulsing arteries amid the sloshing sounds of your naked environs. And then, having made it through what we now label as birth trauma, choke out amniotic fluid and suck in your first gasps of oxygen, the first not provided by your mother, and then you are out, and alive, and cold, and near blind. 

Trauma or not - you can choose your story, your label - but birth seems clear to me, to be the time you first undergo a life of repeat experiences of thinking you were one place, one relationship, one way of being, only to find out abruptly, or sometimes tediously, that everything you knew to be true was not so true, that dark can become light and sloshing become cooing and that shit is what you make for a living. 

Then, later in life another transmutation, where you learn to make different shit which people want and your shit turns into money. And later, a re-birth, where you realize your life has become dominated by money - and not necessarily the quantity of it, because both excess and paucity bring problems of imbalance. And maybe you transform away from money to a life of philanthropy or asceticism or abject poverty. 

Somewhere in the chronology of all the rebirths, reinventions, your father comes to you in the middle of a winter night and tells you to put your slippers and a coat on, and takes you outside, to the crest of the hill in the cow pasture, the top of the tobogganing hill, and he says, “Son, look up, look at that.” And you see something so profound, so rare, something you had not even learned about in school, something from the time before you emerged from mother’s cradle, violet and emerald waves hanging from the crown of a black winter sky and first revealed.

You cannot make sense of it, this rebirth from naiveté to enlightenment, and yet, unlike every other metamorphosis of your life’s arc, this one, this one moment, does not turn on things getting worse, but turning to more mystery, more divinity, electric in your nerves and challenging your heart to beat with such discovery.