So Much Winter!
With the last of the autumn leaves hanging on the trees, I find myself reflecting on winter.
When I set off on my wandering adventure, I was struck by the excitement of it all. New people, new places, new experiences. After a couple of months, however, the newness began to ware off, the dust began to settle, and I found myself in new terrain, in what felt like a vast empty plain, barren, cold, harsh, with very little energy or life to be found.
I had entered winter.
In this winter period a question began to surface, an old, familiar question that I had been circling around, but one that had remained unanswered for years, tantalisingly out of reach:
“What am I here for?”
As this difficult winter period of my wandering began to settle in, I stumbled across this poem by Michelle Roberge:
O cursed winter... O cursed wandering! So much time lost not knowing what to do anymore: emptiness, in-betweenness, blur, discomfort, indecision, stagnation, doubt, hesitation, fog, uncertainty... Empty time, lost time... O cursed wandering! Be over now... Be gone... at last!
Why such homage paid to winter, to that cessation time, to that essential wandering! Cursed season or unloved season? Despicable season or despised season? Misunderstood season? Season to discover? Season to befriend.
Immediately I knew that it was speaking directly to me, reminding me to welcome in this winter, to go underground (so to speak), to cook in the uncertainty and unknowning, to learn what I had to learn, and to wait for spring to return in its own good time.
As I began to own this winter period, and began talking to friends about it, gifts began to serendipitously emerge. One friend mentioned that she had been reading Katherine May’s book ‘Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times’, in which she writes:
Doing those deeply unfashionable things - slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting - are radical acts these days, but they are essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings, and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that old skin will harden around you.
It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.
I knew I had to surrender to this winter process!
As I began to surrender, I rediscovered a helpful ‘anam cara’ or ‘soul friend’ in the form of Bill Plotkin, through reading his article ‘The Realm of Purpose Least Realized (But Most Essential in Our Time of Radical Global Change’. In the article he explores the idea that we are all invited at some point in our lives to undertake a psychologically risky journey, which may take many months or years, a savage quest into the dark depths, into the underworld, in search of our unique soul purpose, our own unique meaning, in search of “the one life we can call our own” (as the poet David Whyte puts it). Bill Plotkin writes:
Here's the most important thing I know to emphasize about underworld or soul purpose: This knowledge of what it is to be fully and uniquely yourself, of the gift you were born to bring into this world, can never be identified or described in any social, vocational, political, religious, or other cultural terms. No one is born to have a particular job or role in a particular human community. Rather, like all other species, we're each born to take a specific place within the Earth community, to fill a unique ecological niche in the greater web of life, to provide a suite of unique ecological functions. And that place is what I mean by soul, and occupying that psycho-ecological niche and providing those functions is what I mean by soul purpose. This is the realm of purpose nearly absent from contemporary discussions and most all contemporary practices and methods for uncovering and embodying purpose. And it is the most essential of these realms, especially in this time of radical, global change.
What is my unique niche in the earth community? What is my unique message or dance or song that I am here to speak, to dance, to sing? What is my calling, my vocation, my destiny?
This is what this winter period is about for me. I’m at a key threshold, a transitional moment in my life, searching for a way forward into my soul purpose.
I’m shedding an old skin, with the new yet to be revealed.
I wonder what I’m becoming...