In a wintering time we are sometimes led kicking and screaming to a quiet stop where parts of our lives are consolidated and made apparent, usually things that have been ignored for a long time. Wisdom tells us not to resist this. The questing part of us has to allow the soul to catch up with the body. It’s good to think of wintering time as soul time. As Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams say, Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.
Phrases Posted on Facebook, February 2019
From time to time there will be wintering in our lives. We get an image of that here in the Northeast looking at trees in February. Bare and stark we can see the bones of the trees. We, too, come closer to seeing what is fundamental and upholding in our wintering times. This may feel paradoxical but is essentially an opportunity.
In a wintering time we may sometimes feel that we are simply existing and not living. Here’s a quote from Carl Jung to rouse and encourage any such despondency: The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
Whether we are in the heat of summer or the chill of winter, love is where we actually are. It takes a little trust to believe that to be true . . . a good thing to practice in wintering times.
On an evening when there is no wind and snow is falling gently, we see the world around us slowly blanketed in white and in a stillness that can seem very close. Could this be at the heart of wintering–a quiet spaciousness that holds all and includes all equally? Perhaps experiencing such an evening we might feel that we, too, are quieted and held close to the essence of things.
February Thaw–a time when winter lets go a bit, but it is slush and mush in RI. Thawing and freezing in a wintering time is just how it is. We think we’re done with something difficult in our lives. WHEW! And then it’s back again. Perhaps wintering could be thought of as a time of patience-practice.
In winter when I was a kid visiting grandparents in their home above the Artic Circle, it would already be dark by two or three in the afternoon. So we made igloos out of snowballs and put candle stumps inside them. The snow glowed and shed enough light so we could still be outside in our makeshift play yard. Those igloos are icons for me of what is possible in a wintering time.
The days are getting lighter. We can be fooled though, for March can yet be a snow-spitting dragon. But we can hear the birds now of an early morning. That’s the ticket . . . to still hear birds signing in our souls even when things are dark and cold.
Here’s a poem about wintering. It’s in my book, “Joy Is the Thinnest Layer”.
Hibernating
Like cloth the quiet falls
into place, falls white upon white
covering my sleep. The silence
is dense–a brocade, rich cashmere
or fine merino, layering up and I begin
to feel the patterns of my breath
shuttling back and forth–constant
back and forth weaving up days
and hours, weaving a marriage gown
in which I wed myself to my life,
to have and to hold through all my winters
until love becomes lived.
The snow-spitting dragon has just stirred again in New England. Very often when we have a wintering time in our lives, we won’t know we are through with it until much later. An internal spring arrives when it will, but we can be ready for it by saying thank you ahead of time. Gratitude practice before any appearance of a desired manifestation is a sweet practice.