Ben McKeown

Short excerpt from an email I sent last night… thought I’d share it with you:

I’m still not ready. I need to meditate. I need to find myself in a peaceful place and simply reflect on the season the way I’ve done for years. I can remember sitting alone in my mom’s house listening to quiet Christmas music and just staring at a 13-foot tree in the living room, thinking. Mostly I remember thinking about how I wish Christmas could be good again, how I wished my family could be happy again, how I felt scared and depressed and trapped in a place with little hope, as if failure or death was imminent. I also, though, remember other moments alone in reflection.. A moment in the driveway, a song called “Simple Praise” on the speakers, thoughts of Jessica and a first kiss on an early New Years’ morning; a moment on the top of the dam on December 20th, wind steadily freezing my fingers while I wrote, while I lamented the dying Autumn, mourned the slow retreat of darkness, wished deeply to be like the winter; a moment in my car on the way home past a Christmas-light-lined shopping center when I felt the pull of the goodness that the baby should represent, while I bemoaned the perversion of his story; a silent moment in the woods with friends, listening for owls in the dark midnight, looking awedly at stars, sowing the seeds of relationships that continue to grow to this very day…

I need this. I need a long walk or a hike or a moment alone. I think I’ll make it my goal this month to find that. After all, this is preparation during a season of just that - preparation. For the light, for the new year, for the dawn of possibilities, seen and unseen, real and impossible. I believe the cold and the profound darkness lead me somewhere within myself that I cannot otherwise see. I deeply hope I might again allow myself to follow. Reflection gives me life.