Having kids means, in part, passing through childhood again, but with an entirely different lens, a perspective deeply entrenched in childhood, yet wholly beyond childhood. One slight thing I’ve learned over these decades is that our world, as still and stagnant as it sometimes appears, is always moving, always in flux, our bodies shedding skin while simultaneously producing new cells.

On the edge of this December solstice, with the threads of worldwide violence thickening and spreading and our own good, green planet poisoned and ill, it’s worth remembering the universe we inhabit always, in perpetuity, rotates back toward the light.

What does the solstice mean? my daughter asked. How to answer this primal question? Cusp, I answer. The place to open your heart and eyes and lungs, and breathe in.

In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms.

– Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

West Woodbury, Vermont