Deep Winter.
The holidays are behind us with their conviviality and cheer, merry lights and song, and abundance.
The New Year has passed as has Quitters Day – the day most people have given up on their resolutions.
Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, with his exhortations for activism and peace marks the mid-point of January.
We are on the other side, sliding into February. The shops all tell us so, encouraging us to show love by purchasing chocolates, alcohol, and flowers for Valentine’s Day.
So what are we left with?
I mean, what are we *really* left with?
I think there is a way to let all of that energy into this deep winter.
Can we take the conviviality, the songs, merriment, and cheer, can we take the energy of acknowledging changes we want to make, to improve ourselves and our world, to make this season or this year better than the last, can we be peaceful activists, can we show love to ourselves and others?
Can we keep it simple?
In Winter when the storms rage, winds whip, and cold settles and remains, we need to stoke our inner fire.
The sun may shine. It may gloss weakly through high thin clouds or try to illume peppery skies, How we wish it would burnish bare branches.
This lack of light, Earth’s distance from its source of heat and warmth, affects us emotionally and spiritually.
Grey Grey Brown and Grey. How do we overcome these days?
As the Earth has retreated from the Sun, so must we.
Winter is the time for retreats.
Not everyone can afford the time or money for a retreat where you go somewhere – to a place like The Golden Door Spa or even Rancho La Puerta. You may work multiple jobs to make ends meet, or have multiple people – multiple beating hearts, multiple souls – for whom you are responsible.
But you are also responsible for making the frayed and frazzled ends of yourself meet.
You are responsible for caring for your own soul.
As such you may find that going deep into the naturally occurring darkness of this time of year, is actually a way to meet those responsibilities. It’s a place of discovery.
Like entering a dark cave, or even staying at an unfamiliar home, your senses prickle at the unfamiliar.
How long has it been since you’ve prowled the hollows of your soul? Perhaps you fear what you might find.
The retreat is designed to alert the senses to the soul’s call, which may feel unusual after so many weeks – or years – of external stimulation. Like Supermarket Sweet, you’ve scrambled, hastily hustling for ingredients, only to arrive flustered and lacking.
Listening to yourself, learning to hear yourself, isn’t like that.
It’s slow and methodical, taking the time to go through every aisle, discover new brands, flavors, and preparations, assess the cost, and make a deliberate decision – a resolution.
That’s what a resolution is. You’ve used the strength of your mind, of what will or will not continue.
You have re-solved an issue, conflict, or quandary.
But you’ve got to be able to see, to know, what needs resolution.
Yes, an at-home retreat, over a weekend, or every few evenings, can be just what you need to lay the path, set the course, for the next season, the next section of your life.
Let’s keep it small and simple, shall we?
Let’s address typical categories, but tell the story in a different way.
This season from the Winter Solstice to Imbolc, or Candlemas, is the perfect time to shed these accumulated layers and reveal the radiance underneath.