Winter may just have been very different for many of us this year. For whatever the dark nights, howling winds or snow-filled skies may have hurled at us, this New Year may well not have begun with a mood swing to end all mood swings, followed by a general descent into long nights of gloom.
Something that may just have made a welcome change.
Indeed it may even have inspired a wholesale transformation in who we are as we look forward to Spring.
For – whatever Christmas afforded us this year – we may well have fulfilled a deep yearning for a more contemplative, frugal period after it, especially if we have not succumbed to the incessant pressures to keep promoting excess over need and insatiability over gratitude.
Leaving us open to what the rest of Winter offers – the ultimate time of renewal and restoration – as we have perhaps confronted uncomfortable truths in our lives, even our global lives, so that by the end of it, it has begun to work its meditative, insightful magic and we have started to take healing, liberating steps forward. At the same time responding to our grave environmental concerns by not consuming so many of our earth’s resources.
Not for us anymore merely being compliant to the demands to bustle our way around the insanity that dresses itself up as the all-year round sales. All that achieves, of course, is a fleeing from the apparent bleakness, yet transparent honesty of mid-winter into a culture that insists we surrender our very being to an increasingly controlled existence that insists our life=buying and selling.
Very many of us, for so long, have felt the psychological schism that these actions generate even as we pursued them. A division we may have experienced first in early age. I recall a good friend painting a Christmas morning picture from when his first child was tiny. Whilst opening his first gift the boy was happy to play with a particular toy over and over and even the box it came in. But his father felt pressurised to force his son to open more and more presents so much so little was considered of any value by the end.
It was the wee boy’s first lesson in consumerism and all that it entails. An instinctive sense of simple gratitude was wrenched away from him.
Meanwhile his father knew that what he had done was wrong.
But the pressure is relentless for all of us. It is manipulative. Indeed it is even addictive.
Just as it can be at the dinner table with all the gluttonous extravagance that can accompany it all – again in spite of our better instincts urging us not to consume all before us.
For deep down we all know that a humble, shared meal with family or friends lingers far more than a gobbled, bloated one. It is gratefully received. It is celebrated along with all those with who we converse as we perhaps realise just how much we have in common. Our common humanity.
All of us know that that is what is vital. Just as it is during these late winter months when we invite friends over and light a whole array of candles and put on the kettle. As our reflective time becomes their reflective time and our awakened universal consciousness grows together rather than our terrified egos.
Thanks to our activating of a Divine presence that miraculously resides within us. Invoking a sense of profound intimacy in our lives. Offering itself through grace without us doing anything to earn it. All we have to do is to focus on it, to nurture and to cherish it.
Starting the very moment we feel it. Perhaps right now.
And here lies the heart of the dilemma many of us have faced this Winter. So many of us still remain immersed in an increasingly desperate system to which presence or the present is apparently an unproductive state. So we are pressured into scrambling frantically about in an incessant future that can never be truly satiated. Forever chasing excesses that are short-lived and unsustainable on so many levels. Before we topple over into a past that regrets it never really appreciated all the simple wonders of life that it blindly passed by in its futile search for more.
A passing-by of the miracle of life no less.
A life that can only be truly experienced in all its authentic glory in the present. Even on a frozen, yet utterly clear day in early March. Spellbound gazing up at the extraordinary brilliance of the starlit night sky as the icy air revitalises us. Warming our souls before the flames of the log fire that finally begins to stir and unleash who we truly are. Always with the possibility of returning to that inspiring silence, content simply to be, with nowhere to go, the late snowfall at the door, drifted high.
A life that flows seamlessly and fearlessly once we see right through our tragic sense of separation from its true Source and then becomes precious to us in every breath we take. Igniting us with an energy and vision that is wholly unifying, harmonious and creative in its outlook.
Just as soon as we overcome our desperate insistence on responding to our daily alarm clocks with a wholesale preoccupation of what we lack. For we lack nothing in a world that is content to share and not to hoard. In a world devoted to humble receiving and giving not grandiose buying and selling.
As finally we emerge from this Winter not with lives to be be lived as an expression of a capitalist will but of a will that is at one with our original spiritual identities.
Peter Strother is a spiritual activist and journalist. His new book “Spiritual Being or Economic Tools – Just Who Are We?”(ISBN 978-1-78279-844-6 paperback and ISBN 978-1-78279-843-9 e-book) is being published by O-Books and comes out on February 23, 2018.
www.peterstrother.wordpress.com Twitter: @PeterStrother
