Thursday, December 4, 2008

Winter cold, Advent hope


While the economy continues its dreadful ride, here the winter weather isolates and raises the anxiety of those who would be prone to fear. Antidote? For me, prayer, silence, more prayer and the best non-anxious listening I can muster seem to help weather all kins of storms. Gunilla Norris helps, too.
..."when time is marked differently (than on our calendars) when it is a way of attending to the moment, we will experience the beginning of winter... Winter begins with a deathblow. Something is absolutely clear-- we are not in charge. The trees are stripped. Only the evergreens are left with their blue-green darkness.
Now is the time for no thing. We are invited to enter this mystery. Frost is the teacher that shows us we would not survive a day without a home and heat. And our souls, too, know something our outer selves do not register most of the time: in winter we have the chance to enter a clear, empty space. Whenever something ends, something else has begun. Our souls can dive into the biting cold, into darkness, into bare being. The unknown is there. There is no calendar, no time. No self-definition. Winter is a womb in which to grow...."

Gunilla Norris, The Mystic Garden, p. 9.
Flickr photo.

2 comments:

Jan said...

"Now is the time for no thing." Oh, so beautiful, even though we don't get that much cold weather down here in south TX. Thanks, Jennifer.

Ruth Hull Chatlien said...

The womb in which to grow. Yes, I've been think of it similarly this year.