Portent, Stillness, and Vision

January is the deepening, the moving into the realms of meditation, stillness, and  listening.

Oh, there's plenty to keep us occupied, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the Olympics, a season of superlatives.  But more and more we are drawn into our own hearths, our own hearts.  The weather can take a wicked turn (we had ours before Christmas), but the cold itself is a spiritual state, one of grandness, beauty, memories for which there are no words.  But there is also no small amount of hope.  At base, we know it'll all get better, fairly dang soon.   So we tough it out when we have to; we look to see what's out there—when there's an outside chance.

Maybe it's a Western thing, maybe a Northern thing.  The snow on pines, the drifts against a brick wall, the circling of geese, the kitty snuggled on my lap, a beef stew on the back burner, winter has it's lovely moments.  This piece of life is incredibly seductive, calling us, calling, calling, calling.  We walk, sometimes down paths that weren't available to us when things were easier. We look wistfully out winter windows, laden with hoarfrost, to watch a milky dawn, and then put the water on for tea.  There are worse things than being at home by the fire.

It's the time our stories speak to us; when our dreams are insistent, when our hopes take flight, and some part of us advances toward adulthood, existing joyfully alongside the kid with a snowball locked and loaded. Adolescents are not the only ones who are unsure about what part of themselves is all grown up and what part is still a three-year-old.

We only have about a month of this left.  Then the first daffies  poke their heads up through the frozen soil in our gardens, reassuring us that everything is going to be all right.