We are in the dark bowl, the earthen night-held lull, of midwinter. Here in England it feels magnetically still. We are engulfed in earth’s darkness more than eighteen hours of the day, and when the sun is up, its path feels as low as dusk. This year, the dark is especially deep, both in potency and in heaviness. There is hell split open on the ground of Bethlehem, which is, let’s remember, in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. The reverberations of this go on and on through my psyche, all of our psyches, and through the earth—this level of human death, of horror, of violence and vengeance turned to madness.
With this in my heart, I offer this story of swans today as the most fervent kind of prayer. White feathers of peace surround us all, suffuse us all, and most especially those most vulnerable and in need of sanctuary and protection.
White swans of midwinter— tundra swans who have just arrived back in England from Siberia this past month—may you go forth and come back to your human cousins who so desperately need your help to become whole people, whole hearts, whole daughters and sons of this Earth, again.
May you forgive us.
May we kneel at the edges of your great marshes, at the edges of your holy nest where a precious egg rests, and do everything we can to protect the song that sleeps within it.
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There’s a reason it’s this story, at this midwinter moment, for me.
This past November, my mother and I followed the nettle thread of our maternal line all the way to Yorkshire.
