Tag: soulwork

The Dark Heart of Winter

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Winter is here and the wide world grows smaller as I huddle into the safe sanctuary of my sweet home, my little nest. Here I live in a round ruby-colored haven, a jewel set in a meadow of green.  Winter has not yet ensconced us in terminal grey, warmer days than usual and even sun have greeted us. The tall trees that stand around my home are reaching upward. As I sit, right outside my window, hemlock is waving her soft fringed branches in the breeze, sunlight pouring down on her.

The sun is setting at 4:30, and I am indoors so much more this time of year. There’s a sweetness to this, life feels very small and contained. Not in a rigid way, but in a way of gentleness, of tending hearth and home. Both on the physical plane, and on the inner plane, the realm of soul. This is a time of turning inward, looking into the dark places inside myself, making peace, and making space for new blossoming to come when the time is right.

I’m acutely aware of how busy my life is, how often I am pushing and striving, how I fill my time with social visits, work, even the garden which takes so much care. Seems I always have something I “must do.” I’m choosing to set that down for a while, choosing to get still, and small, and quiet. My perception of the demands of the world will always be there, there will always be something I must do, and I am the only one who can relieve myself of that burden. And I’m not saying that’s an easy thing! These patterns are so ingrained that creating pockets of stillness feels challenging, creates unease in my belly, and I even feel fear arise.

I look back over the years of my adulthood and I think I’ve missed many opportunities to take winter deeply in. This time of year gives us a chance to slow down, but we have to be willing to take that chance, to set things down, to choose to embrace the fertile darkness and the inner time. I know this, and I feel it to be so true, but I tend to get stuck filling long dark evenings with television or scrolling on the Internet. But there is an opportunity here to deepen into my own heart, to make beauty with my hands, and to have more time where I’m doing absolutely nothing. But I have to choose this. I have to be the one to put down the remote, or maybe even unplug the television for a while. To bridge the moments of uncomfortable stillness and trust this intuition that stillness and quiet are so necessary.

Just now there are two towhees on the ground outside my window, their tails held high, they bow and dip, digging in the earth for some delightful morsel to eat, they lift their heads and look about,. make contact with their companion and go about their work. How right they are in the world, how totally themselves. How would it feel to have freedom like that? Freedom to eat, fly, and nest, but most of all freedom from the tyranny of the mind that tells me I always have something I must do. How can I break that cycle, and find deep peace and ease in my bones? A recalibration in my nervous system towards stillness? A true setting down of the puritanical work ethic that seems to thrum inside of me all the time pushing me ever forward or chastising me if I refuse to be pushed…. Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.

As usual, I don’t have any solid answers, just more questions and more questions. Yet I do have a sense, a glimmering of possibility, a knowing that it could be another way. And I’m going to choose that, even if it’s unformed and not quite tangible yet. Even if it makes me uncomfortable as hell. Even if I forget, and fall off course, and beat myself up for it. I’m still going to try, I’m going to follow the thread of longing, for still and quiet dark winter nights.

The Christmas tree lights sparkle, I sit and look at this beautiful altar to the Christmas spirit and to light returning. I sip my tea and feel grateful for the safety of my home. The containment of my small world that feels so gentle. My tea is hot and creamy, spicy Chai with just a touch of sweetness. My body is cozy, wrapped in layers and warm slippers. Mac the cat sleeps on the cushion of the chair beside me, pouring out a sense of radiant contentment at the comfort of his body, nestled just so in the softness of the cushion.

It’s all so beautiful, this small and quiet life of mine. So far from the hustle and bustle, the fray of the years of active parenting. Now I only have myself to get ready for the day, and the evenings are luxuriously long. A fact both startling in its beauty, and arresting in fear. What do I do with my wild and precious life when I I’m the one who must make it what I long for it to be? Sovereignty, so beautiful and so terrifying.

For this day, for this season I am going to choose to let myself not know. I am going to choose to be in the liminal space between things. I am not young and I am not old. I am not rich and I am not poor. I am not certain and I am not lost. I am, slowly, so slowly, arriving. Arriving into what? I couldn’t tell you… But something is unfolding inside of me that is mysterious and magnificent. This life that I am weaving, I can’t quite see the warp and the weft forming together into tapestry yet, yet I sense and know that tapestry it will become if I stay the course. Maybe that’s what this winter is about. Maybe this is a winter of weaving, of pattern making, of allowing the colors of the thread to choose me rather than me choosing them. I trust the pattern. I trust the slow growing of cloth. I trust myself. And I trust the darkness.

Seasons Turning – Autumn Comes

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Today is the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere. We arrive again at the threshold, crafted by seasons and time, the changing of the sun, the tide ebbs. I’ve been feeling the change since the middle of August, the sun hanging lower in the sky, a little bit of chill in the air at night, dry grasses giving the land that tawny autumnal glow. It’s a bittersweet time, in some ways I’m always ready for the seasons to change, to step into something new, to recenter. And yet its hard to let summer go.

 Summer is a season of incredible energetic outpouring, working on the land, outdoor adventures, later nights and less sleep. Summer feels full of fervor and exuberance, and I truly love it. This whole span of time from late spring until the end of harvest season I am out on the land so much. Hands in the soil, feet in the soil, body in the river, hair soaked with sweat. I’m watching the seeds go into the ground and whispering prayers over them, I’m watching the little shoots sprout up and begin their cycle of life, watching them put on leaves and fruit, harvesting and eating and preserving. I love it, and I am exhausted.

And now autumn calls, with her soup pots bubbling and long walks with falling leaves. With quiet evenings at home, hot tea in my favorite mug, dreams of art supplies littering my little table, and driving home in the dark again. It seems to me that each year I get older the seasons grow sweeter, and I feel the changes more acutely, both in the earth around me and inside of my own body. The earth within me. It feels good to let things change, it feels good to surrender to the cycle of the year, the wheel of time, and the ever changing present. As if we had any choice! And yet, to see the pleasure of this seasonal arc, and feel held within it, is somehow so tender for me.

I think part of that is because there’s a way that I’m able to pay attention to life that is exquisite to me, and it hasn’t always been this way. So many years were spent in anxious survival. Being a young mother, and then in an absolute disaster of a marriage, never really making enough money, throw a little bit of addiction into the mix, and you can imagine from there…  It hasn’t been an easy ride. which makes me all the more grateful for the simple beauty in which I sit in my days now.

I can’t claim luxury, I have such a simple life. But it’s beautiful, and it’s handmade and crafted by me to suit my needs and my desires. I get to be present in my life, to be free of the chronic and painful tensions I lived with for so long. I get to craft my days so that I have time to be with the earth and the sky, time for writing, time to notice the changing seasons, to grow food and eat good food, to gather herbs and make medicine, to spend hours in the evening reading poetry, or lying on the floor of my beautiful little home with my cat purring at my side. It’s all so simple, and I’m simply so grateful.

In this time of seasons changing, this time of surrender, of looking within as the autumn calls us to do, I’m thinking about what skins need to shed. About what I’m ready to set down. About what I’m releasing and who I’m becoming. It doesn’t all feel clear yet, and that’s completely OK with me. Answers come when answers come, and the inquiry is really the interesting part of the journey anyway.

Over the summer months, there’s been a lot of inner work happening around some wounds that I have carried and the ways they manifest in the world. I’ve become aware of this cloak of fear that I’ve lived with throughout all of my conscious life. The fear of somehow not being enough, not belonging, being too much, being exiled. This undercurrent of fear has caused me to shape-shift and morph myself into a way of being that I perceive to be more pleasant to others. This is one of the big endings that I’ve been undertaking. The ending of the story that I need to be anything different than I am.

I’ve been growing braver, I’ve been speaking my mind more, expressing how I truly feel, even when it scares the shit out of me, I’ve been asking for more money, learning not to say yes when I want to say no, and figuring out how to truly listen to the signals of my body so that I can make choices that are in alignment with my true needs. It’s been subtle, my life looks much the same as it did in May, but my experience of being in it is really quite different. There’s a fierceness in me that I didn’t know before. There’s a resoluteness, something inside of me isn’t standing up. Broad-shouldered, strong-eyed, Free of the giggling simpering of girlhood. I think I’m truly becoming a woman. Which, at 42, you may think about time… But I would argue that many adults never really leave the stage of late adolescence. So I’ll take it. I’ll take this broad-shouldered, broad-smiled, strong spine, soft-bellied, wide open-hearted woman, I’m becoming.

So the seasons turn, and we turn with them. And as autumn arrives I take this opportunity to turn inside. I take this opportunity to close the hatches a bit, to lay off the throttle, to sit back into the sweetness of my life, and the unknown unfolding of my becoming. Before long rain will start to drip down my windows, and the tawny grasses will grow green again. And then, I’ll be dreaming of planting seeds in the soil and pea shoots and early blooms. But for now, just for now, I’m going to get still. I’m going to sit in the beauty of the simple life that I have created. I’m going to look into my own heart and see what’s ready to be set down. Emptying out the oil to make space for the new. Some interior sorting I suppose you could say. Sounds like a good thing to do as the days grow shorter.  I’m going to leave you with some beautiful words from David Whyte, this line hums in my heart so often…autumn blessings to you all.

“You must learn one thing.
The world was meant to be free in. “

Sweet Darkness
by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.