Journey of the Heart

  Winter Sunrise by Jennifer Wenn Too early for me in summer, but now it’s there, waiting. Shadowed blackberry bushes deep in slumber, squirrels not yet scrounging stray bird seed, but cardinals will soon touch down and greet the orange and rose glow stealing in off to the south, just over the cedar hedge, behind the wildly growing evergreen on the downslope and the stately sleeping oak reaching over from back and left, dangling a few stubborn leaves, the spreading blush not reaching the patio sundial but caressing the top of the little arbour and awakening here and there from the largesse of yesterday’s squall a delicate opalescence, bestowing a hushed peace, a pause between breaths, the fragile promise of light to come shimmering on the chilled zephyr whispering through the pine needles. Jennifer Wenn  is a trans-identified writer and speaker from London, Ontario. Her first poetry chapbook,  A Song of Milestones , has been published by Harmonia Press (an imprint of Beli...

I have found as the light wanes and winter solstice draws near that the darkness comes with its own gifts of light... Alaska only receives about 5 1/2 hours of daylight by solstice time, and its rich, velvet, navy skies present a unique opportunity to connect with the beauty of night. December is a time of year where we are forced to work a little harder to find our joy and light beneath the waxing of the deepening dark and the waning of the sun.  Galaxies is a reflection on the stars above, the offerings of winter's sky, and the transformation that happens when we learn to take the dark of night and find its gifts. The void is where dreams are formed and imagination gives births to new ideas and new creation. The stars are where we look to find hope amidst the dark. And the night is where our edges dissolve, and we are allowed to further dissolve the shapes and structures that hold us in place in the day and stretch out into a greater space of being, so we- just like the ...

  Here we are, entering into the longest nights of the year… Though we have created our world so that we might have light all the time, the darkness still finds its way into our psyche, into our soul. What a gift it is to wrestle with ourselves, though it doesn’t always feel like a gift. There are two poems that radically shifted my own perception of darkness: Rumi’s “Night Goes Back” and Rilke’s “You Darkness.” In both of the poems, the poets declare to the night and the dark, “I love you.” I remember at first being shocked by this, but perhaps that shock is part of what helped to cut a door into darkness that I, too, could eventually walk through.  Into the Dark Again by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer Dark and getting darker— nothing to do but to make of the body a home for darkness, to open every secret drawer where we hide our private darknesses. Who knows what might happen then? How immeasurable we are. It is only terrifying until it becomes ...