winter blues…

It is that time of the year. Mid February when the spirit is ready for spring, but not yet the earth. The snow is still falling and the skies gray, and the winter is still around, much as we yearn for spring, for flowers to bloom, for squirrels to retrieve their nuts, for birds to chirp and the geese to make their journeys back. It is that time of the year when we are ready for change, but change is not yet here.

Winter is a time to go inward and reflect and perhaps the very nature of how long winter can be suggests how much time we need as we flow and we grow and we prepare our seeds of intention for springtime. We worship the growing light and we pay attention to our bodies and we nourish from within when we can. and we cultivate patience and mindfulness – a knowing that, as Shelley puts it, even when winter comes can spring be far behind?

As the sky lightens, it is time to move. or so thinks my daughter Anji as we see her increasingly run around the house as if ready to burst into spring song, the minute it arrives. That readiness is what we prepare for this time of the year. We take care of details, we shed our excess pounds and we make our way to movement and song. We gather together to celebrate the last few rituals of winter – hot chocolate at night, late mornings in bed, even as we start to transition.

Transition is a slow process. We think it happens in a day, that we get through change just like that. But it doesn’t. It is slow and painstaking and gradual and requires us to be with the present in whatever form it is. It requires us to accept our lives, its myraid details, its highs and lows and the even planes when nothing much is happening. It requires us to show up with the same attitude of humility and waiting that we are willing to show our children as we witness their growth – sometimes in huge spurts and sometimes in slow gradualness.

and we learn to perfect our own way into this world one small day at a time – a way of love, heart, gratitude and fullness.