Hello Winter. It is officially your season, though we have been hibernating for many months and seasons in our secure and isolated little dens with our stockpiles of goodies and a select few to keep us company.
Your extra-long presence in this epic and historical year has been a practice of quiet endurance, virtuous patience, and awkward, unyielding acceptance. It has been a time to prioritize, contemplate, and simplify. A time to be wise in waiting, to study what is, rather than what we want it to be.
We have learned to sit at the edge of life, peeking into a future more uncertain than most of us have ever experienced (but is it really more uncertain, or has our attention just been drawn to it?) We have held hands with death and impermanence, sadly many of us literally. We have witnessed nature work in mysterious ways and we have seen social/political and environmental destruction leave a new degree of bewilderment on our faces.
Like our ancestors witnessing great plagues, wars, and injustices, we have learned (a tiny bit more) the discomfort humans have faced since the beginning of time. Our modern ways have been very comfortable, so comfortable we have forgotten some of what it means to be human.
Winter, your cold, harsh ways are beautifully humbling and your metaphorical messages deserve more attention and respect, despite the sharpness of your frostbit sting. Are you the season that is most overlooked? I assure you, your shadow is just as necessary as your more colorful siblings, Spring, Summer, and Fall. We are paying attention to you.
You, long winter, have prepared us for a greater capacity of evolution and resilience. For nine months we have been in a womb of darkness, albeit a precarious and unexpected pregnancy, we are rich with potential and we will give birth to a new era. I do hope an anthropological expedition of transcendence will emerge from the wisdom found in the deep dark.
I find it no celestial coincidence that this year, your Solstice sky adorned the brightest light we’ve seen in thousands of years. A year when we needed a sign of hope and remembrance. As glorious and vibrant as the auspicious alignment of planets was, it could not have been hung for our view if it weren’t for your obsidian blanket securing it in place. You, winter are the space that holds the light.
