Wintering thoughts…
We move from the shortest day and look to the lengthening light. Although January and our calendar signals the new year, nature is not yet ready, calling us to accompany a while. Nature is in need of winter; of wintering and so are we. The chill comes to cleanse and strip back. A yearly foundation and a time that we could honour, rather than rush through. As well as looking to the horizon and the lengthening days, can we learn to value and work with wintering and so create the fallow and balance that gives our lives foundation and depth.
The bodies of trees shed their veil so that we can observe what was always underneath. Strip back, to the backbone, the structure, the beauty and form made from the angles, to the honesty that the resting of these leaves provide. Murmurations roost to and are shed with each startle from these stripped back trees. Their bare canvas revealing their beauty that much more.
Can we slow enough to witness and come to know rather than to chase and create a new. Not just yet. In the undressing of this season drawing us to the fireside, draw up a chair too, of reflection, of sitting in silence and listening in. For now away from the chattering of spring to come.
The shorter days mean there are repeated ease of opportunities for seeing the sun rise and set. Within the world dimmed around us we can further see the silvery winter light streaked with the promise of pink. We can look up, without waiting, to star gaze. Sensitive to this energy, to prana at dawn and dusk.
Can we pause and be in our body. Listen into our body rather than conversations about our body. Can the pause in our breath, be in stillness and observation rather than waiting. Of homing in on a moment that asks for no growth. It encourages us to simply be with a faithfulness to the inevitable change coming. Powerfully still.
Wintering is often likened to our relationship with death but perhaps it has more to do with life’s honesty. These moments following harvest ask us to live within this reality of the smallness of our own cycle. In the industry and the busyness of valuing substantial lives there is a risk of ignoring the impact of our pursuit of worth and immortalisation, of individualism, on nature itself. Wintering is not death, not in competition with life, of proving worth, it is in harmony with it. At this time globally we are so connected to this grasping relationship with our breath, with life, with the systems that create so much division, disparity and inequality. There is risk in being occupied with personal growth at the expense of harmony. Let our growth to come support harmony.
To survive wintering, to accept less, is the oldest skill. Tired; a time to rest. Not collapse into but to celebrate wintering. Spring is growth, a repetition of fractals to create expansion. Wintering is the forming and cherishing of this first and most simple factual from which we unfold to create, I hope, repetitions of harmony. In nature what appears whole on close inspection shows devision. It’s blooming outwards in repetition and relationship brings harmony, brings us back together. This wintering, this slowness is actually life blossoming in freeze frame, that this stillness is not fallow but unsung solidity.
A time to repair. What is in our lives that we need to darn, not to invisibly mend and shamefully disappear but to celebrate with contrasting stitches and a ‘sashiko’ of repair.
We need the cold and discomfort from this season. We are engineered for it. We require it to reset, to feel contrast, to feel cellular and alive. We have become numbed in our consumption, comfort and success. It is time to feel the sting of cold rain as well as fireside warmth. To feel both the challenge as well as the comfort of our practice.
Stored sunlight for the darker days is in the tubers and roots of vegetables stored, preserved and salted. Time to nourish prana and the root of our biome with phytonutrients; warmed, stewed and easily digested. Creating comfort and the feeling of warmed earth deep into our bodies.
The window of activity shortened by the limited day calls us to fire light and candles. Movement and practice bathed and slowed in it’s shadow. The simplicity of lighting the wick calling us to ritual. Of intention and other rhythms we bring to our practice that replicate the shedding of leaves. Aryuvedic practices cleanse and brush our skin ready to increase its sensitivity when we unwrap once more in spring.
Can we explore and reside in this wintering a while more before Spring comes