The Unitarian Fellowship of Peterborough

 

 

I have always claimed to love winter. Sure, there’s a part of it that WAS about skiing and skating, snowtubing and making snow angels. I grew up making snow forts and caves, and when the snow was fresh, my mother would give us syrup to drip into the snow to make maple popsicles.   And, I must admit, that as I grow older and less frolicy, I become less enamored with it all. But two other dimensions of my love of winter remain. One has to do with the rich experience of a full turning of the seasons, a climate where one cannot ignore the changes that nature experiences. I know, people who live further south will say that there are true seasons there as well, but we of the northern climes know that it’s just not the same thing. 

 

A few years ago, after my years in California and while living in Wisconsin, I took a close-up photo of myself after taking a walk with Tillie when the temp was sub-zero. There were icicles hanging from my hat and my hair, my eyebrows and eyelashes were glistening with frost, and my scarf was frozen stiff. The only purpose in taking the photo was to send it to several friends in Berkeley…to demonstrate the reality of my harsh existence. This illustrates the other dimension of my love for winter, which is grounded in the high value I place on hardy, sturdy, ‘put up with what life deals you’ kind of living. (It’s probably a Scandinavian thing.) People who live where winter is extreme (and admittedly, we’re a long way from the most extreme conditions) have to be survivors…people who are willing to face the elements…people who accept that the weather will determine how to spend their time. It may be misguided, but I place a high value on being this kind of person.

 

It seems to me that there are about four stages of winter. It is not long after the fall equinox that we begin to sense its coming. The trees change colour, the leaves begin to fall, the first frosts on the pumpkin occur. The air is crisper, cleaner, and we catch the scent of the coming snow.

 

Then we come to the time of the winter solstice, when the days are their shortest. We find ourselves in liminal time, balancing, as it were, between light and dark…a time when, it is said, the veil between the mundane and the spiritual is at its thinnest. During this time of solstice, we occupy our psyches alternatively with the value of the dark and the hope of the coming light.

 

And after the solstice, we move into the third stage…deep winter…a time of the most snow and the coldest temperatures…a time when it seems that winter will never end. Our days continue to hang in a balance…but now between frustration with the added obstacles the weather presents, and awe at the incredible environment in which we live. During this time, it is hard to imagine that anything that is exposed continually to the elements can even still be alive.

 

And finally, every year, regardless of how hopeless it may have seemed, the signs of spring’s coming begin to emerge…the air becomes moist and fertile…the snow turns to slush…and the trees begin to bud. 

 

We are right now in or entering that third stage. The hope of the holidays has faded, and spring seems far far away. It is just winter. Every day in every way. Winter. Cold, relentless winter.

Now I know for a few of you, for those who relish winter sports or who have the luxury of hunkering down daily with a book by a fireplace, this is a time you treasure and you make use of to the fullest, regretting that it will end too soon. But I suspect for many others of us, spring cannot come quickly enough. I mean, couldn’t we just as well get that same full experience of winter if it blew in for only a week or two? Couldn’t we prove our hardiness by spending just a month or so in winter? 

 

The season of winter I have spoken of so far is a season of the natural world. I believe that we also have seasons of the heart that are not much dictated by the calendar, or the tilt of the earth, or the distance from the sun. These seasons might be hormonal. They might be influenced by the amount of light or sleep or good nutrition we receive. They might come and change without warning or precedent.   They may come bidden or unbidden. These personal seasons are most often, I suspect, dictated by the events in our lives, the experiences we have, and the chemistry of our brains. And just like the seasons of nature, we are left to ride them out, to choose to experience their gifts and their teachings or to rail mightily against them.

 

And so today, when the weather outside is surely that of deep winter, the image I want to hold up is the one painted in the poem that Paula read earlier. It is the image of the leafless tree. The appearance of lifelessness, or a fallow time. We have one here…thanks to Don Barton. Look at it. Iconic, isn’t it?...at least for those who live with such trees a good portion of the year. Bare trees have a certain impact on us, perhaps because we know what it feels like to be so exposed.   A tree, a living thing, a thing of great potential and beauty, that stands bare, unclothed, unprotected.    And the value that I wish to hold up is that of the spirit of that tree, the wintertime spirit that stands empty and ready. 

 

Now, some of you may remember that I spoke at the Christmas Eve service of another dimension of this same reading from Wiederkehr …the dimension of this fallow time that presents as a time of waiting. Certainly, her poem seems to focus on that…twice she refers to this time as the practice of the sacrament of waiting. On Christmas Eve, I mentioned that when I used this poem as an opening reading for a Fellowship event recently, I asked those gathered what they were waiting for. And I told you that one person responded by saying that waiting was against his religion…because waiting sort of causes you to lean forward in anticipation, pulling you out of the "now." And I agree with him. Waiting in such a way as to deny and ignore the present time does not serve us well.

 

Rather, the wintertime spirit that I speak of today, the spirit of the empty tree is one of being empty and ready for what will come, of being hollowed out and bare…not waiting for something else. But rather, in that state, of being particularly equipped to seeing what the winter has to offer. It is a time when we give up our usual role of providing shade, and rather a time of learning what it means to be empty. It is a time when we can hear the quietest voices, the lightest of footsteps, the most distant bells. It is a time when we can learn to distinguish between the most subtle shades of white, when we can see the reflection of the tiniest light or most faraway star in every snowdrift and each droplet of ice. It is a time when we discover the unseen buried in surprising places.

 

I want to clarify that in talking about this wintertime spirit, this soul-dimension where we might learn to appreciate our emptiness, that I am not conflating it simply with a ‘shadow side’ or with anything depressive.   I’m not looking for ways to think positively about something that we don’t like. Rather, I’m attempting to see winter and its companion spirit exactly for what it is, to put on my winter eyes and in so doing, to appreciate it in all of its faceted dimensions. You might see this as my advocacy speech for winter, a season which often gets a short shrift as the negative season, just as we often compare white with black, and light with dark, and life with death. I want us to think of winter, with all of its very real physical and psychic obstacles, as a necessary and valuable part of the cycle of seasons. 

 

Last week, I mentioned something from the book that the daytime bookclub is reading… Returning to the Teachings by Rupert Ross, about how the aboriginal community is more predisposed to seeing everyone in the community as a valuable member, without judgment or comparison. It’s a challenging concept, because, speaking for myself, I’m not wired that way. Not yet anyway. I’m much more inclined to want to rank the season and my states of mind on some scale of preference or value.   And I thought about this penchant yesterday, and in the days before Alice’s memorial service, as I got to know her children and grandchildren, and came to see so clearly that she was proud of them, no matter what they did, no matter the season of their behavior or the temperature of their attitudes. She looked at them with grandmother eyes, and every part of them blossomed to their fullest. 

 

Every part of them…every part of us…every season needs to be seen and understood as one facet of a whole, without which the whole wouldn’t be whole. And when that kind of acceptance enters our beings, we see through those winter eyes and see the magic and the gifts of the season, whether that season be the weather outside or the weather within.

 

And again, as I said earlier, what it has to offer, at least in part, is the experience of being empty. Standing like that bare tree, in an unusual noiselessness, without the flutter and tremble of leaves…a state that at first might seem desolate and frozen, but on closer examination, is a necessary and blessed time. Altered time. Special time. It can re-shape us in ways that make us receptive to new ideas, new understandings, new embraces. It can prepare us for different ways to leaf out, or can prime us to be in a longer state of leaflessness. It can open us to receiving care, of being protected from the wind, or wrapped against the cold. Admittedly, it can be a time of pain…of looking at things we’d rather not see…or enduring a climate seemingly too harsh to bear. This too is a part of the wintertime spirit that just is.

 

Now, I’m not of the opinion that pain makes us stronger, or that there is some masochistic benefit in going through difficult times. I’m simply suggesting that sometimes we need to turn the stone over….to see what’s on the other side. And if we can’t lift the stone, that we can at the very least become aware of the existence of another side, another way of seeing things and experiencing the world.   This is a theme that runs through one of my favourite books…The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran…because throughout he points out that opposites exist together…that our pain and our joy are interwoven…that the very knife that carves a flute to make beautiful music is the exact same knife that pierces us. Winter and spring, summer and fall, are each a part of the marvelous cycle of life. And so with our winter eyes, when at first we see only the bare branches and drift covered landscapes, we can begin to see that the season contains magic, and hidden treasures, and buds of possibility. 

 

Christine Lore Webber wrote a poem called “Mother Wisdom Speaks” in which she says that the world needs the hollowness of you, needs you to be a space that provides a passage and a cup to catch sacred rain. You need the hollowness of you, that you may be ready for some unexpected inbreaking of insight or growth. The wintertime spirit revels in the emptiness and embraces the quiet. The wintertime spirit is one that rests in that hollowness and stands in readiness for whatever will come next. This morning I ask us to trust that hollowness….to trust the cycles of things knowing that no one season stays forever, no one season remains. And in so doing, by trusting, may we allow ourselves to be transformed by the magic of winter. 

So may it be. Amen.

 

 

May we go our ways, with the eyes of winter…ever seeing the blessing of this quiet season. And may we open our hearts to the lessons of winter. 

 

Amen.