Dec. 2024: Wintering
Image: Morrigan, the Celtic Goddess of death & war; prophet; shapeshifter
Artist Unkown
As I was overthinking about what to include in this email and what to write I found myself telling myself to approach it as if I were writing to myself.
So, this is as much for me as it is for all of you.
As Winter settles in to its all too familiar grey tones, rough textures, and empty void I am delighted in the space that has opened around me with school on break and teaching scaled back.
It is truly a sigh of relief.
Winter that is.
Winter in the body-mind-soul.
Yet I know the masses don’t experience it that way nor the systems we live within.
That is why it is hard to remember to slow down, to relish in the void, to soak in the stillness.
I am here to tell myself and share with you that the art of wintering is a form of resistance against a culture, the systems, and the conditioning that suppresses, oppresses, and perpetuates harm.
So, for the love of all things good, take winter.
“December's immaculate coldness feels warm. December feels like blood.”
- Zinadia Nikolaevna Gippius
This was recently shared in a newsletter by our local bakery, and I pinned it as a most wise, visceral knowing that resounded within me.
December feels like blood makes my mouth water in desire for what is essential, the pulse of living, the darkness of hibernation, the warmth of fire, the rawness of life, the myths and archetypes of death.
But not just to conceptualize it, to sensually experience it.
Blood is symbolic of life and death; the pulse of creativity.
Is it not in the cave of winter that some part of life dies only to be born anew? Expired, lifeless ventures composted into flourishing potential.
Is it not in the void from which materialization manifests?
These are questions I ask myself in hungry curiosity.
Hunger for a wider way of being and existing that is stoked by an all too sterile reality.
Sterile in the sense that everything outside of the narrow norm is too often pathologized, demonized, and colonized.
I say this with very little pessimism and cynicism and rather blatant respect and compassion for the circumstances and conditions that are part of my life and contemporary culture.
Because without the compassion and understanding it would be hard to choose differently. And to choose differently we must if things are to change; if individual and collective well-being are to become a reality.
If a culture of care, connection, and creativity are to thrive.
That is what Inner Woven has metamorphed into over the last few years of roaming in the shadows and unraveling many knots.
It is my renewed hope and intention that Inner Woven serve as a space for fostering a culture of care, connection, and creativity.
I believe that where we are currently is full of valuable information that can inform us for how to nurture a wider future with deeper meaning, more belonging, and renewed choice.
The unnecessary suffering we bear witness to and experience currently is no one person’s fault, but everybody’s problem, because none of us suffer alone. Meaning if one-person suffers we all do. It may not be obvious, it may not be conscious but it is most definitely true.
It is the nature of ecology to be in relationship and for those relationships to feel the reverberation of everything within its web.
Not only are we a part of our local ecology but also the collective, and most compelling (at least to me) the unseen as well.
The ecology of life is vast, wide, deep and constantly in relationship and rippling out into every nook and cranny.
So, yes, the suffering of one is the suffering of all.
And the healing of one is the healing of all.
It will be slow
Healing is slow
Transformation is slow
Metamorphosis cannot be rushed
Expanding happens in strides.
But we can engage it now and every moment after.
What death does the Morrigan hover over in your life (ways of being; patterns; narratives; shapes that are expired)? What does her sister of birth and new life desire to sow in its place?
May the cave of winter gently hold and nurture all of you <3.