Winter Ritual

In these times on the planet, we hold our breath collectively at the cusp, within a deep winter as we face our potential obliteration. There is an unknown that encircles us like snow: a blankness the color of our bones. Will our knowledge in our bones carry us through? Will the winter ever melt in to the silver linings of streams? What does this moment in history show us? When the time is darkest, and days pass as though nothing will shift, will the smooth shell begin to crack, does the formlessness give? What emerges at the crux?

Have we all faced the void? The nothingness, that could be the centre of everything. Within the din of this place of creation, there is a space of no noise. Descending in to winter is like the bucket lowered in to the well of the earth, the source. In a time of incineration, the flip of the coin is the eternal spring of human nature.

Under the crust of this rock, everything flows back to us, from the underground ocean, black, where we go to in unconsciousness. Beneath the tarmac of passing days, where the tiredness tore and dissolved, washing up at the shore of somewhere that is More. The mare; and the quantity of shells, where we wore our wares: our expensive clothes in the streets; somewhere underneath we dance like the bare, stripped trees. The tap, tap tap of our feet, the question of no lack, because we know that a new season has our back. The tap drips: silence amid things. The icicle, at the brink: drink from the thawing spring, the eye of the storm.

(...The dead of winter calls for the cryptic and poetic, to decode the unspoken lore that is the silence of our collective consciousness in foetus form before the coming year.)

We are all explorers: walking the tattered fringes of a dying world, riding the foam of a curling wave. When we are at the end of all we have ever known, we become the creators of the new. What is it to experiment on to the gleaming canvas of unmarked territory in our world societies, with the intention to bring more goodness in to this reality? No longer accepting the modern world’s jittering, glitching regime, actively imagining and stepping in to exactly what I individually dream - could this be called psychosis? How to navigate this arctic polar express? Where is the silver string to guide throughthe dying mess?

Christmas: a time of giving. The nutcracker reveals the sweet, and the flame gives the heat. Even this deepest crisis of winter is giving, as we reconnect to what is eternal and undying at the end and the bottom of all that is been, and the beginning of all that is yet to be. The kettle boils, the seamless dream of lulling days and nights is studded by the silent drum, calling us to deeper sleep, where our synchronicities, in habit, crystallize. We are in the formlessness, before form, warm, protected. We keep to our crafts, tending our sparks. We are lanterns in the mist, carving bobbing dragons from the whiteness. Licorice.

The ritual of winter is stillness after the descent. I focused deeply last winter, and in spring, I climbed the year steadily like a ladder. In summer I jumped, and I flew. Now I have memories of travelling as a poet in beautiful places, like a bee amongst flowers. In autumn I descended like a leaf back home. Now, I relocate myself to a place I casn grow in even deeper soil.

The bulb germinates in the dark. The light bulb in the mind turns on when faced with the wall. Boredom in winter turns to look out the window: nature dominates, and a hole bores in to potential; a new cycle is formed. The germs nurture the seed of the flower to be born.

Between the curtains, you can gasp a new day. We grind up the flour on the floor from last autumn’s acorns that were fallen. White flour from nature’s discard; the white powder makes bread like flowers and flora, that grow from the cracks in the frost and snow, keeping us safe in heart.

So I leave you from this essay with naught but your own self. We are all down at the waterhole, drinking from the one source in our yearly rest. Time has coiled like a bauble, the mattress ready to spring at the first stirring of our reascent in this story of us.