Winter's Promise
by Joseph Jastrab

Henry David Thoreau once suggested that “nature is but another word for health and the seasons are but different states of health.” The root meaning of the word “health” is “whole.” When we slow down enough to take notice, one begins to feel the seasons as different states of wholeness. A year well lived in this way reveals all of the guidance we need to live a wholehearted and healthy life. I return to these principles at the beginning of each season because it helps me live the season as an internal event. I find the place where “my winter” meets “the winter” and listen to the dialogue that ensues. Whether we are aware of it or not, as human beings we constantly strive to find a balance between ourselves and the rhythms of earth, the rhythms of the cosmos. This balancing act happens on the physical level as our bodies adjust to changes in light and temperature, and an equally significant adjustment process is underway in our emotional and spiritual bodies as well.

Winter is on its way, and with it comes our return to an ancient and renewed conversation with the potency of darkness, stillness and silence. While much of our human consciousness is caught up in the brightly lit business of the civilized world—the deluge of holiday catalogs, buying and selling, processing information, paying taxes—there is a more ancient part of us dialoging with what lies waiting in the quiet darkness of winter. If we pay close attention to nature in the late autumn, we see plants and animals turning within in order to survive. Animals seek shelter beneath the surface world and slow down their metabolic activity in order to conserve their precious inner warmth. The plant’s energy is in its roots, which are being held, fed, and strengthened by the winter soil. Biodynamic farmers consider the soil during the period from mid January to mid February to be the most receptive to the imprinting of cosmic forces. In this imprinting is the conception of all new life that is born in the spring.

The same rhythms and possibilities exist for us humans as well. Deep within the roots of our being, there is something alive and promising, waiting to be born. If we could only bear the waiting! If only we could give as much nurturing attention to what lies inside us as we give to our outer world concerns, perhaps then we would fully glimpse winter’s promise: that when life is at its darkest, and especially then, renewed life and possibility comes to rekindle the receptive heart. The poet, Rumi, noticed this: “At the time of night-prayer, as the sun slides down, the route the senses walk on closes, the route to the invisible opens.” Winter invites us down, beneath the domain of the merely physical senses, to a world best navigated by sitting still, and best seen by closing one’s eyes. And what we find in the resting ground of our being is a God of Light waiting to be born in the humble circumstances of our immediate lives.

 

- Joseph Jastrab
jos@bestweb.net