Within this poem is an ancient intuitive understanding of winter as a time to leave things alone, to let things remain hidden, even to themselves. A time when to name anything would be to give it the wrong name, most especially refusing to name ourselves, a radical sense of letting ourselves alone, without even the most subtle, internal self-bullying or coercion. It is the intimate experience in sitting alone by a fire, in silence and in reverie, with both a simplification and a growing clairvoyance of what is just beginning to be made known.
THE WINTER OF LISTENING No one but me by the fire, my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside. All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire, what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need. What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained. Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. Even with summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world. All those years listening to those who had nothing to say. All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard. All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening. And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter have led me to that otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own. We speak only with the voices of those we can hear ourselves and only for that portion of the body of the world it has learned to perceive. And here in the tumult of the night I hear the walnut above the child's swing swaying its dark limbs in the wind and the rain now come to beat against my window and somewhere in this cold night of wind and stars the first whispered opening of those hidden and invisible springs that uncoil in the summer air each yet to be imagined rose. -from David Whyte: Essentials
Winter seems to be nature's way of teaching us to slow down and reflect.
. . . And I know it is not coincidence, that today is the winter solstice. Slowing down my verbal mind, allowing each and every emotion, and memory it's due. Knowing as in David's poem, life flows onward.