January Dreaming - Interiors & Night Skies

The life we seek, is within the life we live

Photo by Elisa on Unsplash

“Winter is about patience, waiting for the right moment, the right time, the “kariros”, when the right action becomes apparent.  Winter is a paradox: waiting becomes realization, stillness swarms, slow looking ravishes the senses, cold stones in a wall cry out, and we hear our name as an echo.  The life we seek, is inside the life we live. January becomes January as we stand watching silence fall into silence.” Marv Hiles from The Anthology of the Soul

Lately it’s been extraordinarily cold where I live, with the temperature dropping to single digits and the windchill pegging the meter at dangerous levels.  So for the past few days I’ve decided to fore go my daily walk in the woods with my dogs (the bitter cold a bit hard on their aging joints), opting to be content viewing the winter woods from my office or kitchen window.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table right as I write this post, watching the morning come up over the hills surrounding my home. If I were to paint this scene, it would be framed by  the warm dark wood around the kitchen bay window. It would focus on the eastern hill,  still in shadow as a pale sun rises behind.  It would be composed in a minimalist pallet of blue white snow, bare limbs frosted an inch deep,  occasionally accented by the beige remnants of ragged-edged beech leaves (which right at this moment are beginning to glow as if from within, as the light inches past the ridge line). 

All is quiet. January is the oldest month and winter the oldest season. So much is sleeping underground.

And yet, January is a time when we are getting ready, we are not just sleeping.  In deep January I take stock of this present winter and all the winters that have come before in my life.  I’ve been thinking about the long city block neighborhood where I grew up as a kid, remembering what it looked like when it was covered in deep lake effect snow.  I remember the “sport” created by some of the guys on the block, who would wear their slippery smooth church shoes and hold on to the bumper of a car and “ski” while an older brother gunned and fish-tailed the family car down the street.  Never fear, eventually someone’s mom would step out of the house in her head scarf, coat and boots and put a cabash on the whole enterprise, because someone was gonna get hurt and damn it those shoes cost money. I’ve been dreaming of winters and of summers —the most recent summer, so brilliantly here and gone before I really felt I’d settled into it.   I’ve been remembering my mother, and the summer my family stayed at a cottage on a northern Indiana lake, a red checkered cloth on a wooden picnic table with apples and peanut butter sandwiches and sugary purple Koolaid, a transistor radio tuned to a static laced Chicago Cubs game.  

I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot this winter…so many years gone, and never really gone at all.  Love is like that. Even though someone we love passes beyond the veil of this life, the relationship doesn’t end, but it does transform.

Winter is a time of remembering and envisioning, when we tune into the inner workings of our lives, when I sense the edges of my own mortality, when my driveway gets nearly impassable, when I hunger for anything green (I’ve been babying along the poinsettia from Christmas and invoking tender leaves of wheat grass, herbs and basil under a grow light).

And yet, the silence also feels like the answer to a prayer, the circle of seasons is turning and the pattern makes sense.  The winter stars are punctuated and clear, they somehow feel closer as the great sturdy square of Pegasus heroically spans the dome of heaven. 

Last night I looked up at the fathomless sky upon returning home after a warm gathering of friends. We’d all been wearing layers and sweaters. Michelle had made a a hearty hot dish served right from the oven. We played a couple of rousing games of euchre (a midwestern card game that you must play if you live in Indiana or they will eventually send you packing to Wisconsin). In January, the time of many interiors, in that cheery light of cherished relationship, we shared a gathered moment around a couple of wooden tables. This too felt like part of the turning of a circle, and part of the well woven pattern of the season. As I momentarily stopped before climbing the stairs to the front door and looked up at the winter stars, I breathed in the stillness, the rightness, the comfort of well woven patterns as the earth turns and stars faithfully slip above and below the horizon.

Photo by Juho Luomala on Unsplash

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Practice and Question

Practice:  Lay your hand on your heart, breathe in and out slowly for a few breaths.  Read this phrase aloud, “The life we seek is inside the life we live.”

Question: What do you sense about the rhythms of the current season? Are there metaphors you sense in the inner and outer spaces of winter?   What are you remembering or dreaming about?  What feels right in your body and spirit?   

Note: Is a time of If you live in a southern climate, there may not be snow…but there will still be the natural shift in season, internally and externally.

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The Great Wild Mercy - Winter Spring Tour

I’ll be back on the road this winter/spring with concerts, workshops, retreats and other exciting events. I’m so delighted to be touring with my all time favorite collaborator, Gary Walters. Watch for a very special double bill with master songwriter/storyteller John McCutcheon in April and two full string quartet shows in March and May (get your tickets soon as these shows are selling quickly). You can get all the details for tickets and retreat registration on my website tour page HERE

You can register for this retreat at the Shallowford Center for Mindful Living Here. Again, spaces are filling up very quickly. Reserve your space soon.

Video From A Great Wild Mercy Release Concert

Here’s a video from my A Great Wild Mercy release concert at the Buskirk Chumley Theater, featuring the song “The Handing Over Time” co written by Gary Walters and me, arrangement by Gary Walters. Performed by Allie Summers and The Gathering of Spirits String Quartet. A song about the seasons changing seemed appropriate today :-).

Note: Supporting Subscribers have access immediately to the full concert on Vimeo!