Gratitude

Listening to the stillness

apricot warmth
suffuses abstract dawn sky
ice crunches underfoot

The clouds felt especially distant and cold this morning until the dawn light softened and warmed them. A reminder that changing our perspective can truly alter how we perceive and understand the world around us, and thus, how we respond.

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Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are almost as short as they’ll get this season, and the nights almost as long. It feels like a dark time for the whole world. Yet we’re just two days from the Winter Solstice and the turning of the year back toward light and warmth. (For you in the Southern Hemisphere, the opposite is happening.)

This season of short days and long nights is my time to slow down, take stock of where I am, and savor the quiet darkness in reflection and meditation (my kind—which means walking the nearby wild and greeting my wild plant-kin). It’s my time to dream and ponder and wonder, going inward to enrich my outward life.

To remind myself as I look upwards into the vastness of the universe at night, the darkness lit by ancient starlight, that I am small and my life is but one of many. That life as a whole carries on no matter what, although perhaps not in the form we humans would prefer.

To be still and open myself to the wisdom of this numinous planet and all the lives that have come before mine and will come afterwards.

To, as the poet Louise Glück wrote,

be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write.

(Substitute “live,” “create, “speak out,” “act” or whatever verb you prefer for “write.”)

Thanks to Terry Tempest Williams for posting Glück’s words on her Instagram feed yesterday. They were just what I needed to hear to inspire the year-long project I am beginning after Winter Solstice. More on that in Sunday’s reflection.

What do you find when you let yourself be still and listen? Hit the comment button below and let us know.

Blessings!