sinking into the comfort zone of the between-times
and how reading Claire Keegan made me want a good stiff drink
I’m writing this in the between-time, or as some traditions call it, the time between years. Since my son’s Waldorf elementary school days, for each year over the course of the days leading from December 25 until January 6, I’ve kept a dream journal. In it I transcribe my night’s dreams the next day by candle light, the point of which is a way of capturing what’s to come in the year ahead: each day corresponding to the months of the calendar year just begun. Thus, the dreams of December 25 hint at January, those of the 26th point to February, and so on, until the final morning’s journaling on January 6. These twelve nights are the Twelve Nights, ending at Epiphany.
If you asked me but why Mackenzie? I’d tell you the practice is personal, meaning, what we each draw from it is based on whatever meaning the dreams have for us. My scary clown-suited third-grade teacher spooning me pudding is not yours, even if she has the same freaky red cheeks. My but why has been a mode of reflection (never a bad thing really), the calming sense from peeks at what the coming months might hold (in lieu of that crystal ball I’ve longed for), and insight while looking back at how a year panned out; maybe the best answer is it provides a mirror. Through that mirror it’s also helped me experience a way of touching on my notion of the spiritual. And I like it for the ritual: waking in the dark coldness of winter, breathing a few minutes of silence to re-collect my dreams, sitting down to write before anything else (even coffee! a true feat), and then closing the book until the next morning.
I’d never encountered this idea of gathering hints of the fore amidst the lingering days of a year verging on solidifying into the aft, until I began reading Rudolf Steiner. Floris Books has a work devoted to it, as well as lots of Waldorfy-Steiner works.
Increasingly people use the time between Christmas and Epiphany for reflection, bringing things to consciousness.
I did a bit of reading recently because I’d misunderstood Steiner as being the creator of this whole notion of the twelve nights as a practice, and found there’s also the tradition and legends of Rauhnachte, sometimes called the Magical Nights: again, taking place during the twelve cold, dark nights after Christmas, marking the “missing” days of the Celtic calendar. Here on Substack I stumbled on
who recently wrote about the traditions of the Omen Days, along these same lines of making use of this time. Auguries, a word I love, are signs of the future, and often looked for during the twelve days on walks or hikes or wherever we spy them.All of this coincides with me curling into my seasonal snail’s shell and wanting to seal off the door to the world. I’m yearning for comfort, warmth, contentment, yet also, connection. Not connection in the loud(ish) forms we mostly have it: not social media (please, less shouting in 2024?) and not the contrived connections of algorithms that spew us in directions we might not choose to find ourselves. The connections I want require being present. Being quietly aware. And then, settling into small gestures; the small gestures we give, receive, or even simply note, are the moments that make up the years of our life.
When snails seal off their shell’s aperture they do it by creating a layer of protection called an epiphragm. I am enthralled by the idea of a snail deciding to go inward (literally!) seeking a gastropod’s version of cabin coziness until it chooses to re-emerge, slowly and on its own terms; as a writer I dream of solitude, and as a reader I hope to be captivated enough to fall deeply into another writer’s words and thoughts. Despite being a snail admirer (the niche of chocolate making I practice and teach is slow chocolate, symbolized by a snail with a cacao pod for a shell), this hygge-if-it-ever-was idea of an epiphragm is new to me. I owe my enchantment to Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, her memoir of being forced into quietude and solitude.
As winter settles~~here in Oregon we are in fog most days or else buffeted by rain~~I am reaching for deeper writing even as I seek cozylandia (or is it called blanketcore). I overheard someone on NPR call a recent publication an “airport novel” and I’ve also heard of “beach novels,” both of which (apparently?) are highly-publicized, commercial works that don’t require deep dives; less One Hundred Years of Solitude, more three hundred pages of snooze button. Not what I want.
But Claire Keegan and Chekhov, yes.
Chekhov might not be the writer that comes to mind when the word cozy is proposed, but it stands out for me that he was good at setting up a miserable, blizzardy and anything-but comfortable world before bringing his characters in from the cold, so to speak. Not that he provides the answers to the discomfort, but that he nudges us toward the question of it.
Chekhov, it can be argued, was the first truly modern writer of fiction: secular, refusing to pass judgment, cognisant of the absurdities of our muddled, bizarre lives and the complex tragi-comedy that is the human condition.
~~ from, A Chekhov Lexicon, The Guardian
Then there’s Keegan as comfort zone. Her prose is what happens when a stick is chisled to a fine and sharp point then used to etch layers of a story onto frosted ice, breath softly to bring it fully to light. Remember in the movie Amadeus when Solieri, speaking to Mozart about some brilliant, new composition says, too many notes? No such thing in Keegan, and because her writing is so distinct it is shocking to not have to wade through any muck. I read Foster and wanted a drink, the darkest drinking chocolate I could make. It needed to be thin, not uber-thick, not overtly sweet. I made mine with espresso instead of water, by pouring a tablespoon of 63% extra dark chocolate chips into a mug then heating up the espresso and pouring it on top of the chips, stirring with one of those cute tiny whisks. A smidge of sludge at the bottom is okay. A nice splash of Irish whiskey and hello serious hunker down while turning the page. The chocolate: I used Scharffen Berger because their 63% is barely-sweet and readily available. I suppose selling out of my own chocolate at the holidays is a good thing.
Look, find whatever good dark chocolate you like (and if you say but Mackenzie I only eat milk chocolate hear me out) and by good it needs a hint of bitter beneath the whole idea of “chocolate,” because chocolate is a trained response (if you are picturing Pavlov’s pups, yes exactly) to what mostly all tastes the same. We’re not going for easily-grabbed and go-to packet of cocoa dust blandness; we need a view of the edge and the time is now. I hope you’ll trust me on this: I’m a chocolate maker who has her pick of cacao origins from around the world, including some rare and very coveted ones, and yes, even I love milk chocolate too.
But that’s just one side of a story.
In the dark, hardened, world-stormed days of the here and now, gimbaled between the year receding behind us and the one rolling into view, diving into deeper meaning may be the most sensible thing we can do.