Nature’s Cycles
If you have lived for very long you will have come to recognize that our lives are like stories and they have very distinctive chapters and parts. When I was a child my father worked for the Forest Service and about every 3 years we were transferred to a new place. During these times it seemed to me a chapter closed and a new one begin. This was both exciting and scary. It was hard to leave behind what was known but strangely freeing. I remember this brief time usually traveling through space from one place to the other, that really felt like we were in the unknown zone. It feels like that time is also our collective NOW. This time is known as liminal time or in between time. It is a special kind of time and needs a special conscious approach when possible.
Winter is the time of resting in being and waiting. All nature knows this blessed state, even human nature, but in our modern culture we are lost in a great imbalance, idealizing and over-emphasizing the active, doing orientation in life. We have lost touch with receptivity and being. The initiating active principle is of course a necessary power and principle, but if it is not balanced by the receptivity of simply being, if our doing doesn’t arise out of our deeper being, then all our doing and giving and pressured activity drains us. The more we struggle against life’s storms and currents, the more we exhaust ourselves. .
I am a deep student of the Medicine Wheel of life, and Winter Solstice falls in the North of this powerful mandala. This direction speaks of the deep stillness of earth, and a vast night sky that seems to make an endless night. The winter night sky is so present in the deciduous forests now, where the summer before the cathedral canopy of leaves gave us only peaks of sky in the breeze.. Now the branches of the bare trees seem to etch into the winter night lifting our gaze into the dark immensity. The stars grow brighter, more present.
