Winter Solstice odds and ends

Dragons, darkness and dollar store candles.

•After a year of non indulgence, for christmas I bought myself two very indulgent things:

1. A whole lotta Polaroid film to make self portraits with in 2025

1. My very favorite perfume, Juniperus

I thought I might feel bad about it, but turns out I feel great.

•Lately, I’ve been noticing that the harder I try to do things ‘right,’ the more I get everything wrong.

•For Winter Solstice, I got as many plain white candles at the dollar store as I could find. I came home to my basement studio apartment and lit them. That was pretty much it.

•Okay, I also very excitedly announced to many people, including the man who sold me candles at that dollar store, that it was the darkest day of the year. My teenagers seemed most enthused by this. The man at the dollar store reminded me that I’m not allowed to take the dollar store cart outside. But his eyes were kinda sparkling.

• I once heard Mary Oliver say in a rare interview that she was saved by the beauty of the world. I immediately thought, “me too.” But it would be more precise to say I was saved by the light.

•It used to be that I couldn’t bear to see the sunset every night. I loved how gorgeous it was but, the ache it left in me was bottomless and unbearable. “Come baaack,” or “Please don’t leave!” I’d call out silently like a child to a father she could not let go of. But this year I have started to really, really like the dark. I think its because of how I long to simply be still and look at candles.

•Speaking of candles, I’ve had the urge to paint by candlelight. Not just paint by candlelight, but specifically paint the color RED by candlelight. So I did that yesterday and I felt ancient. I felt like I was painting for all of womankind. I used three different shades of red, and one shade of orange, which felt like a shade of red that didn’t know it was red yet. When I paint I only have one rule for myself; Don’t try to make it look good, just try to let it feel good. That’s why I am never proud to show my paintings to anyone. I’m embarrassed that they will think I was trying to paint something, when I’m just trying to feel without qualification. I am pretty sure I have the same rule for sex.

• I was on a walk a few years ago, when the light took me by surprise for the millionth time and instantly settled every single unresolved anxiety I was carrying in my heart. I started crying. That’s when it donned on me that the language of light is a dialect. And its not a dialect everyone speaks. In fact most non photographers I know, hardly think about the light other than as a means to see. I suddenly realized how lucky I was to speak this dialect, in its infinite nuance and poetry. It brought into sharp relief how repeatedly the deep dark has taught me light’s shapeless words. It made me feel like I had no reason to ever be ungrateful again.

•Every time I try to read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, I get bored and end up googling quotes instead. Yesterday, I found this one particularly lovely, and particularly relevant to themes of darkness, winter, candles and RED

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

•Lately I’ve been really getting to know some emotional experiences I would rather not. They are not sexy. They are not flirty. They are not fun. They are various shades of red and a shade of orange that does not know it is red yet:

Rage. Anger. Betrayal. Shame.

I have astonished myself by eliminating most of my old, favorite escapes that allow me to not feel these things. Instead, I have been sitting with their discomfort in my body, going nearer and nearer to their center, wandering down, and deep and eventually for moments, out through the other side.

When I was a little girl, my favorite books to read were about dragons. My favorite favorite, was about a girl who made friends with the dragons everyone else was afraid of. It was called Dragon’s Milk.

When I read that Rilke quote, I realized I wasn’t just painting RED. I wasn’t just painting the dragons of Rage, Anger, Betrayal and Shame either.

No.

I was painting what comes through the dragon’s throat. I was painting what I wish to come through my own. I was painting what comes from a dollar store candle. I was painting what can never be truly extinguished.

I was painting the flame.

xx,

Yan