I see a hundred insects moving across the air, rising and falling. Chipped notes of birdsong descend from the trees, tuneful and broken; the notes pile about me like leaves. Why do these molded clouds make themselves overhead innocently changing, trailing their flat blue shadows up and down everything, and passing, and gone?
Ladies and gentlemen!
You are given insects, and birdsong, and a replenishing series of clouds.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
The soul’s ripening happens in its own time, like the slow turning of the seasons.
We cannot rush the fruit to grow, only tend to the conditions that allow for its flourishing.
Sacred time is cyclical, not linear. It invites us into the grace of waiting, into the mystery that unfolds when we release our grip on urgency and lean into the rhythms of earth and spirit.
Christine Valters Paintner, The Soul’s Slow Ripening: 12 Celtic Practices for Seeking the Sacred
When you start tuning in to winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives – some big, some small… Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them. […] To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.
Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the mid winter spirit of our days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, flawed and far from perfection, but inhabiting the still center of a beautiful, peripheral giftedness.
David Whyte, Finding the Holy in the Holidays
