Silence, Sleeping, Stirring
winter waiting
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Where are we in the turning of the wheel of the year?
I don’t necessarily mean Imbolc; I mean what’s happening in, on, and around the earth right now that lends atmosphere, essence, quality, and character to our lived and felt experience.
This will vary slightly depending on where you live, so I encourage you to intentionally become aware of what you see, hear, smell, and feel around you, particularly outside.
The groundhog has warned us that there will be six more weeks of winter, which has proved true where I live. The earth is still sleeping, but deep sleep morphs into a slumber. However, it’s not yet time for the spring awakening.
This is one of the problems with commercializing every holiday/holy day. St. Valentine’s Day hasn’t even arrived yet, and neither has St. Patrick’s Day, but both have already been shunted aside on store shelves by Easter, and Lent is not even mentioned. We rush through these seasonal markers at our peril.
I bring up holiday decorations because they all rely on symbols, and those symbols have the power to focus our minds and hearts in specific directions. I resist this. To muster that resistance, I stay more deeply connected to the earth and ignore advertisements and store displays.
The Months
January brings the snow,
makes our feet and fingers glow.
February brings the rain,
Thaws the frozen lake again.
March brings breezes loud and shrill,
stirs the dancing daffodil.
April brings the primrose sweet,
Scatters daises at our feet.
May brings flocks of pretty lambs,
Skipping by their fleecy damns.
June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hands with posies.
Hot July brings cooling showers,
Apricots and gillyflowers.
August brings the sheaves of corn,
Then, the harvest home is borne.
Warm September brings the fruit,
Sportsmen then begin to shoot.
Fresh October brings the pheasants,
Then to gather nuts is pleasant.
Dull November brings the blast,
Then, the leaves are whirling fast.
Chill December brings the sleet,
Blazing fire and Christmas treat.~ Sara Coleridge
This was my favorite poem as a child. It was featured in my beloved Mother Goose book. It still ranks among my favorites because it encapsulates the essence of each season with insight, wonder, and delight.
February is a month of thaw. There may be snow, but unlike January, when snow is likely to remain on the ground for weeks on end, February promises that the effects of spring—the lengthening of days and an increasing angle of the sun each day—guarantee that thawing is trending. Deep winter sleep turns to thawing slumber and restless stirring.
One thing that I enjoyed during the earlier part of winter was the silence. In December and January, the silence outdoors, especially at night, was profound. A clear sky with many stars visible allowed me to see into the void of space, and all around in the cold, the woods were entirely silent. The dark canopy of the heavens above and the silence all around helped me feel the enormity of the universe. The same is true for the early morning just as the sun breaks the horizon; the splendor of the light peeling away the darkness in total silence was magnificent.
Now, in February, that deep, silent sleep is changing. The earth and all her children are restless, turning in their sleep and waking briefly before settling down again. There are just a few strains of birdsong in the morning, and at night, the coyotes and owls occasionally call and hoot. During the day, the squirrels race up and down the trees, and in the fresh snow, you can see rabbit tracks going every which way.
The activity in nature is gentle right now and provisional. Warmer days and nights that stay above the freezing mark offer restless stirrings. But there’s still plenty of silence to be had.
I struggled in January, and the first week of February, I was unseasonably restless for spring. Activity and rising energy in nature these past few days have quenched that ill-timed desire. Now that I am tuned in to the subtle changes outdoors, I feel relief that all is right with the world and that the seasons are changing just as they should, no earlier or later, but at their appointed time.
I’m content now to savor the silence and waiting of winter, having been reassured that spring is coming.
Seasonal living in this way has many applications for our lives, inner and outer.
We often say that things are darkest before dawn. We might also observe that winter events are most stormy, isolating, or dangerous just before spring thaw. Life comes in cycles, and there are difficult times. The lesson of spring is that hope is real, and it often comes slowly, rousing us from a deep-death sleep into a time of restless slumber before we fully awaken into a new season of life.
Until the vernal equinox, these weeks of Imbolc offer an in-between time, a liminal space to notice the gradual changes in nature and yourself. Embrace the stillness and silence that winter continues to provide. Learn to accept and integrate the reality of waiting even when it is uncomfortable. Notice the stirrings within your soul; allow them to help you make sense of what arrives in your imagination and dreams in the half-awake-half-asleep slumber time.
Our inner life and growth are far more entangled with the earth's seasonal shifts than we realize. What’s happening around us is also happening within us. Take this moment in the seasonal round to explore and contemplate what you are waking up from, what is stirring or shifting. You may also ask, what is thawing? Why am I uncomfortable waiting? Am I ready to wake up, or am I about to go back to sleep?
These verses from Rudolph Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul for this week offer interesting aspects and integration of soul, spirit, and nature to ponder in the silence of lingering winter. Perhaps they will stir your inner being and point you in the direction of ascension to higher meanings and purpose through the earth's seasonal cycle.
My power of thought grows firm
United with the Spirit’s birth.
It lifts the senses’ dull appeal
To bright-lit clarity.
When soul abundance
Desires union with the world’s becoming,
Must senses’ revelation
Receive the light of thinking.
tr. by Ruth and Hans Pusch.
Winter offers help in that with bare branches and less landscape color, nature’s enticements to the senses are less strong. Allowed more freedom, the power of our thinking can now more easily reach higher —or deeper. As we know, it is only by thinking that what comes to us through the senses gains meaning. In that our senses are merely “camera-like,” they often are called “dull,” even “dark.” They can give us physical truths but not inner truths.
Wisdom from clear thinking must of course be earnestly sought. With gratitude and joy we offer our stronger winter thinking in “shining clarity” to the world, aware that soul clarity carrying inner truth is “shining.” Our understanding of what individually we want to offer the world is heightened.
We sense that actively growing our higher ego thinking forces furthers our “human becoming.”
We would be enmeshed in all sorts of tangled perceptions without the Being of Light’s gift of higher, clearer thinking. What a gift its stimulating vigor is to our being, to our experiences, and to our sense of who we are, but we must use it with reverence—to really find its shining truth within. ~ Eloise Krivosheia and Roberta van Schilfgaarde. February 2024
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Especially in these incredibly scary political times for the US, I feel so nourished by your reminders to be in my body and my landscape, and to notice the ways in which life stubbornly persists, all the beauty in nooks and crannies.
A gentle and grounded way to begin my day.
Thank you, Jan🙏