How can you dream of an easy rain when all your love
is frozen in glaciers of loss?
How can you hope for fruit to form on the tree when
you can hardly hang onto life each day?
How can you find the promise in a seed when your heart
is lost in the depths of depression?
How can you sense the stirrings of a butterfly when
your energy is cocooned in sorrow?
It takes immense trust and hope to see new life waiting
beneath the frozen, barren land.
It takes deep courage to remain in the cave of loneliness
and painful solitude.
It takes powerful faith to believe in the gestation of a
positive future when all is unknown.
It takes compassionate patience to remain by the
side of an aching seed in the silent soil.
It takes stout-hearted resilience to endure the soul’s
contractions of seemingly endless birthing.
It takes vulnerable openness to stay present to deadness
and not run from staleness.
We wait for new life, but we do not wait alone.
We wait with the mother bear as the little cub within
takes shape and form.
We wait the dormant juices of the maple trees
gathering up sweetness in their empty limbs.
We wait with the pruned rose bushes sighing for
warming sun to sing them into budding.
We wait with the frozen creeks and rivers yearning
to be melted into laughing waters.
We wait with all humans whose weary lives turn
slowly toward re-awakened joy.
We wait with the cosmos which is ever-dying and
being re-born, giving away and receiving anew.
And while we wait, we struggle to accept winter as a necessary
companion, an inner season calling us to be more than we now are,
a confident guide taking us on a perilous journey that is part of every
dying and every birthing.
It is in the winter of our lives that the enduring Voice within coaxes us
along, nudges us into belief, urges us to stay in the dark for as long as
it takes for rebirthing to occur.
In our wintered time, it is this One who draws us close, nestles us near
to heart, breathes strength into our spiritual bones, and assures us
that we are growing wings under the frozen land of our desolate and
emptied self.
(From: The Circle of Life, Macrina Wiederkehr & Joyce Rupp, Ave Maria Press)
