Winter has come early, as unwelcome as a dinner guest who arrives before the table is set, when preparations are still underway and the kitchen looks like the scene of an accident. Snow has been falling steadily, softly, resolutely upon the deck and lawn, the rooftops of nearby cottages, on the lakeshore, even on the lake itself where a thin skin of ice can bear its weight. The empty, wide-open arms of deciduous trees welcome it as a returning lover. The tamaracks and pine trees, spruce and cedar, stand proud as women draped in ermine…

The roads and highways leading to and from the lakeside where I live have shapeshifted from alluring pathways leading through autumn’s extravagant colours to treacherous passages, slick with ice, choked with snow.

Inside my new home, with more windows than walls, the early darkness has entered without an invitation, brooding over chairs and bookcases, curling up in corners, an unwanted black cat claiming her space.

I am surprised by my reaction to all this, feeling resentful, defeated, besieged by an invasion of events outside myself that I cannot tame or control. I take refuge in reading, sitting by the dancing, artificial flames of an electric fireplace, ignoring the weather outside.

The book I open is by Sharon Blackie, a woman whom I met in Ireland at the 2018 Brigid Festival. Sharon had spoken of the need for women to be rooted in the earth, to know their relationship with the homeplace where they live… I had written to you of her talk, of her book If Women Rose Rooted. Now, eager to read her more recent book: The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday. (House of Anansi Press, Canada and USA, 2018), I settle in. If there was ever a time when I craved enchantment it was now in this “winter of our discontent”.

But I did not at first find what I was seeking. Instead of the magic of myth and fairy tales, Blackie wrote of the challenges she faced while living in a croft on an island in the Hebrides:

“You couldn’t extricate the land from the weather – it hit me then that I didn’t live in a landscape – I lived in a sort of weatherscape. And I wasn’t walking on the surface of the land, while weather happened above it and apart from it: I lived inside a coalescing world of sea, land and sky, all tangled up together, in which the weather was dynamic, always changing, always engrossed in its own process of becoming. The wind was not happening to me. The wind was in relationship with me. (p. 116)

From that moment, Blackie altered her attitude, began to court the wind, to dance with the currents. “I let it hold me up, facing into a westerly so strong that when I threw my arms out to the side and tilted forward, the immutable force of it prevented me from falling. We became playmates of sorts, the wind and I—and every kind of wind offered a different way to engage with it.” (p. 117)

I read these words and something shifts in me. Here in rural Ontario, the experience of winter is not a reality separate from my life, even less an obstacle to the life I wish to pursue. It is part of my life, and I may learn to live in active relationship with it. I have what I need to do this: warm clothing, snow boots, — even snow-shoes and cross-country skis—enabling me to go outside and engage with what is happening.

I can experience living within the snow, allowing myself to be enchanted by knowing it as Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes it in her telling of the Inuit tale, “Sealskin, Soulskin”  (in Women Who Run with the Wolves): “the white and abundant hair of old Annuluk, the old grandmother, the old sorceress, who is Earth herself.”

Earth herself, an aspect of the Sacred feminine, has something she needs us to learn about embodied life on our planet. Our souls, our psyches, require the grace notes of winter, require the darkness that may allure us into longer times of rest and sleep to balance our more active days in the brightness of sunlit seasons. Our hearts need time to heal from the engagements, the involvements with others that may have inflicted wounds we ignore when we are moving quickly through life.

Our winter dreams allow us time to recall what really matters most to us, to look ahead to the bright days that will blossom in late spring and perhaps change our focus. We may then pursue what we most desire for our lives, in our service to life on our beloved planet. A winter journal will assist us to record our night dreams and our daylight inspirations, to prepare for a new birth in our lives after winter’s incubation.

There are many ways to take winter as a partner in the dance of life.

Listen. The music is already starting…