Klaios

Winter berries and evergreens

I gathered some winter berries and evergreen boughs for my outdoor planters and wreaths.  It felt good to garland the entrances of our home.  A reminder that the darkest days are soon upon us.  Literally and symbolically.  Yet, a riot of red against unyielding green touches my soul as a symbol so needed for these times.

I once had a teacher who advocated against hope.  He posited that the binary opposition of hope and hopelessness was inevitable.  He proselytized for living hopefree.  He encouraged us to free ourselves from hope and pragmatically stand with all that is.  Illness. Death. War. Disaster. While I can touch the edges of his manifesto, I cannot, I will not, relinquish my fidelity to hope. 

I think hope points us toward something mysterious, grander, and more integrated than our present sensibilities can comprehend.  I see the value in standing honestly in what is and even exploring how we got here.  That being said, hope will always be for me,  red berries against barren white, evergreen against barren beige.

We are surely in the dark times.  Tribal warfare is constellated on local and global scales.  We gather and shout and protest and divide ourselves under flags of many colours. We regress into the worst of our species and the age-old default of ‘might is right’ rules the newsfeed.  I try and stay informed.  I challenge myself to explore all sides of the issues.  But when it gets to be too big, too much, too dark, I retreat to dog rescue clips and cat videos.  My soul longs for sustenance.  Orientation. My sensibilities yearn for harmony.

I leaned a new word last week.  Modern ancient troubadour, Martin Shaw spoke of klaios.  Not chaos, but klaios.  Oh, but that logos signifier stirred deep in me and I felt a shiver of emergent eros.  Something stuck shifted on the poetry of the word. Klaisos defined:  

The verb κλαιω (klaio) means to wail. Unlike the more modest and private activity of weeping (δακρυω, dakruo), this verb describes the loudly communicated expression of grief or pain. We are surely in klaios time.  There is much to be mourned.   

I now know that I have experienced the embodiment of klaios.  Even if I did not know it at the time. Once I was part of designing a ceremony for a mother and father whose daughter was caught between worlds.  The twenty something girl had suffered a heart attack and was in a coma.  The aggrieved parents asked for a ceremony to help their daughter’s soul make the decision to either return or depart.  Such a profound request.  These parents were neither hopefilled nor hopeless.  They clearly trusted something more mysterious, grander, and integrated than even their steadfast love for their daughter.

As part of the planning for the ceremony to be held later in the day, the ceremonial leader asked each of us what we needed to include in such a ceremony.  The talking stick was passed around the circle. Some asked for silence, others for candle light, still others for drumming.  When my turn came, I asked for keening.  Unbidden, the Irish soul in me spoke. My understanding of keening is that which denotes the deepest stratum of grief. It was my ancient Irish soul that made the request. 

The ceremony was one of the most profound I have ever attended.  The ceremonial leader was a beacon of hope in the darkest of times.  We felt it. The parents felt it. It was not a hope that is naïve or innocent.  It was deep and true and real.  Candles flickered, silence whispered, and the drums seemingly echoed the fragile beating of this girl’s broken heart.  Near the climax of the ceremony, when he turned to me and invited me to keen, something erupted in me that I now believe was the essence of klaios.  A guttural song from the depths of my being and the depths of my ancestry was sounded.  I did not know until that moment that I had this in me. A song so dark, so deep, so real seemingly tore the fabric of life and time and meaning as we knew it.  

I learned later that the girl awoke from the coma.  This stands as one of those acausal mysteries, that like winterberries and evergreens set against the barren times, gives me the will to carry on.  Dare I say, in klaios we find true hope.  A light in the darkness.  A new revelation foretold by a guiding star.  A stone rolled away.  A broken hallelujah.  A kiss that wakens.  A beast that transforms.  A seed.  A covenant.  A sprig of soft green in a peace dove’s beak returning to us over the flood waters of despair.  A rainbow of promise arching in the firmament.

Here in the north, cold and dark days are descending upon the forest I call home.  Wood is felled, split and stacked, provisions stored, snow tires calibrated, and most of the acorns and pine cones have been gathered up by the forest critters.  We are ready.  Foxhaven is ready.  The White Thunderbirds are returning.  Yet, before they assert their dominance and drive us inside to tell our winter tales before the fire, I hold up a sprig of red berries and evergreen.  I adorn the thresholds of our home and announce our willingness to hope.  The klaios of my heart calls out to yours. I sing out to the best in us even in these darkest of times.  Into the darkness of global unrest let us sing the ancient dirge of the soul.  Klaios.