Bargain Basement

Salt marsh bench, Siletz River Estuary, Coastal Oregon (photo by author)

Centripetal Season

Winter inverts our waking. Sunk
by shaft to root cellar, cistern, sump,

to carve down the cleat and seam,
quarry the subliminal with longwall

drum, the cuts of kerf and hogsback
lithography. These echoes in the gob

might be the rumbling of the trains
overhead or squall lines on the wind.

Here, beneath the hallowed ground
and holy days, the work begins.

© Jon Obermeyer “The Reassurance of Ghosts” Fugitive Poets Press, 2016

Early December has always a subliminal time for me. I tend to imitate nature. My leaves fall off, turn gray and are swept to the curb. I have an impulse to burrow and hibernate. And it’s not just for cold North Carolina weather. I am this way in balmy San Francisco and on Pass A Grille Beach near St. Petersburg, where you can walk around in shorts on New Year’s Day.

Centrifugal force means “center fleeing.” Centripetal force (from Latin centrum “center” and petere “to seek”) is a force that makes a body follow a curved path, toward the instantaneous center.

December, January and most of February is a time of centering, of ducking below the noise and hubbub. It’s like when you leave a busy urban street and enter the cavernous subway below.

From the time the first Advent candle is lit until “Pitchers and Catchers report,” is a time to take stock, conserve energy and seek illumination at the very depths of my psyche (note the coal mining terms and allusions in the poem above.)

My impulse is to leave the kleig-light realms of Holiday retail aisles, the dazzling merchandising and head to the bargain basement. It’s where my soul is to be found, on sale, marked down, twice, the price tag barely intact.

It’s surprisingly uncrowded and the sale tables stretch forever into the distance, as if we are in the halls of a salt mine.

The holy work begins.

The pre-Christian use of the word “holy” seems to be about preservation and protection.

Winter is when I bring the best of my self-care to bear, and with that arrives acceptance, and following that, compassion floods in.

I will live off that store of compassion for most of the next year, until the next time the leaves fall, turn gray and are raked to the curb.

Jon Obermeyer is the author of Dissolve: Spirit Poems and Guided Meditations, which will be available on Amazon, December 10th.