Dark Advent

As the song goes,

Night and Day, You are the One.

Only You beneath the Moon,

and under the Sun.

(Cole Porter)

Let’s start with Day.

Day is Sun rise to Sun set, and then it is Night.

65 revolutions around the Sun and I now have Medicare,

so I saw a bunch of doctors.

The following issues were addressed with the dermatologist:

sun-damaged skin

personal history of skin cancer

family history of skin cancer

multiple benign nevi

actinic keratosis

seborrheic keratosis

cherry angioma

She burned off some precancerous spots from my face. Avoid sunlight, use sunscreen.

The sphere of the world is enlivened by Light that is generated by Sun, which gives no thought to us and our crops and suntans and skin cancer, 

because Sun has no concern with the little orbiting spheres that are caught in its gravity or the lives that live on them.

The following issues were discussed with the cardiologist:

Abnormal EKG and hypertensive heart disease without heart failure. Blood pressure 140/90. Medication is amlodopine and atorvastatin.

Moon dominates the night, when she’s there,

and she also sometimes appears in daylight,

not really adding more light to Sun’s,

but her image, her face, is visible, and her presence known,

because unlike Sun, Moon we can look at directly.

The following issues were addressed during a routine follow-up examination:

Essential hypertension

Major depressive disorder, recurrent episode, moderate

Obesity BMI 30-39.9

Medication: Bupropion and flu shot.

Moon unveils and conceals her body with darkness,

as she exposes herself to Sun.

She isn’t always there, but she comes and goes in a regular way, like Sun, but circling us, as we circle Sun.

But Sun’s way is not Moon’s way 

and Moon does her disappearing reappearing act while rising and setting, 

an amazing dance counter to ours around Sun.

The following issue was discussed with the otolaryngologist:

The acoustic neuroma, a benign tumor, in my left inner ear. If the tumor grows it can cause hearing loss and loss of balance and paralysis of facial muscles. If it presses against the brain stem it can be life-threatening.

Sun has one beat and Moon has another,

and the two ways don’t exactly align by Human measure.

We want to grasp Time in our hands, so we measure it and number it, but it flows through our digits.

The day I went in for the MRI I had to sit in a waiting room for a long time. A TV with a big screen and no sound kept showing scenes of Notre Dame Cathedral burning down. The procedure is not pleasant. They squeeze me into a tube and close the hatch. It is like being buried alive only then they start banging on the steel crypt with ax handles and lead pipes. I am being tortured and I divert myself by thinking about the Spanish Inquisition and ICE detention centers, but knowing that worse situations than mine occur doesn’t sooth me. I think of St. John of the Cross, tortured and put in solitary confinement where he writes poems and plans his escape.

From the perspective of the living, Death is at most a twilight zone of projections from the Unconscious. There is a dreamless phase of deep sleep that is oblivion, and from this everyday experience of the Void, we get a notion of Nothing, as at noon, we think we see Being clear and illuminated. This daily/nightly cycle of Nothing and Being in our consciousness is a wheel that expands and contracts within the lunar transformational wheel, the solar wheel of the Year, an elliptical wheel. Measured in years, a Human lifespan is sometimes 100 revolutions of Earth around Sun, rarely more than that.

Every year I will have an MRI to see if the tumor in my head is growing. It might stay the same or it might, if untreated, bring me down like the stone brought down Goliath. I can’t feel it, but I think of it as like a pebble in my shoe, except I can’t unlace the side of my skull to remove it. It would require brain surgery. I don’t know how much of a threat it really is, but I have a general sense of dread. I’m anxious about this thing in my head and also anxious about the instability of democracy in our broken republic, as well as anxious about my financial situation — and How am I going to make a living next year? — and will they really cut Medicare?

Or give Medicare to all?

I meditate, I pray, before dawn, and I don’t know what to say, what Name to use, what pronoun to use to address the transgendered transcendent Is-ness. But underground, Unconscious, among neurons and neurotransmitters, perhaps, new connections or new disconnections, and reformulations of activity, are happening out of reach of language and number and conscious grasp. Infused contemplation, as the Mystical Doctor put it.

Advent is one long dark night of the solstice, passing over the actual solstice into the traditional feast of the season. This is the Kairos moment in the revolution when Earth halts its tilt away from the Sun and begins its slow tilt back toward the Sun.

I hope to emerge from the dark night like a seedling pushing out of the dirt and reaching for the Sun, hungry for light, and so on — the dark night of my soul’s journey to the Light, I hope and pray — day and night, night and day.