the state of the world is unnerving, but it’s no accident that what actually nourishes and restores our nervous systems are the same practices that restore the state of the world.
here in this northerly place, winter is deepening. we track our animal nature in longer sleep and quieter lives. the tracks run along the same lines echoing a deepening pattern, but a slower one. morning chores are late, evening chores are so early as to be more like wrangling kids getting out school of an afternoon. we are thicker beings all of us, all dressed in many layers from the birds all floofy with air trapped in fresh feathers, the goats wide with cashmere sweaters laid on under longer hair. the cat has eaten substantially more and is richly luxurious, not least in his habits. he demonstrates the skills of decadent sleep, he is the hearth cat and the lap cat and the purring /bouillotte/ warming our beds.
so there is a great pause, and it reminds us that in quiet we grow more efficient, we simplify. we focus in on longer projects, taking up our timeless stitching or baking or reading. we’ve pared away the demands of the season, over the years, and now we take up whatever is a real pleasure spontaneously. we mill for gingerbread if we like, but it’s not required. oh, we go and root out old movies, but we have to admit that most of them feel like a bizarre form of culture shock. whatever were people thinking? still, an orientation to comfort draws us. later we’ll have a few visitors and they will no doubt be lively with cards and games. mostly we welcome a profound quiet, blanketed in darkness and cosy near points of candlelight or firelight or small lamps. our rhythms settle, as if to nudge us to notice our breath, to arrive in our bodies. to slow our heartbeats like the slow evenings, though quick work in the brief day brings pink to our cheeks. the chaos from that hectic pace of harvest season has given way and we tidy it up, for a little while each day, before the sun dips away again. it’s a good time for paring down, for mending. we find that we don’t need so very much, luxurious enough in cardigans and pullovers and woollen socks and haus-shoes, the heat from the wood stove and the kettle and the slow pots of this or that. our woodpile is tremendous wealth, equalled only by the pantry and the roof over us, and the small skills that serve to wrap us up snug. lucky, lucky, to be so cosy. we wish it to all. may we make that true.
if the news of the world grows too intense, and so it always does, we go deeper into this quiet, not to ignore or escape but to muster the health and strength and clarity to face what needs healing. to be of service, first we must rest. and where we rest must become more vivid than ever, resting in the arms of the living world. we breathe in the earth and breathe out the sky, we are held by the gravitational pull, fully supported by a great living being that we are inextricable from, and by the minuteness of all the microbial life that makes us up, all the molecules of water. we hold oceans and continents and populations within us. in the patterns of our simple days we tread the paths of ancestors, and all the knowledge they gave us, we are gathering for another future.
maybe we were distracted, for awhile. our heads turned by the glamour of the industrial age, by the promise of pleasures that, curiously, we cannot recall now they are waning. like too many presents under a tree, the impression is of overwhelm, not of plenty, and blurs away. it is the faces that have never left us and the flavours of this moment, the scents, the singing, the sensations of the air and the cold land. we’re still feeling overstimulated by decades of excess that somehow deprived in its profuse demands, and we need to nap. that former life is ebbing, the news is constantly of its long illness and impending collapse. a much older way of being, just barely linked through so many half-shattered connections, is reviving. part of our rest is in restoring, in making our own small reparations. how can we be of service to healing what that exploitative pattern has hurt? how can we see it vividly, to resist? mostly, we are just learning new patterns, ones that inherently create the conditions for diverse and flourishing life. in some ways, these practices are the same.
if you are hurtling toward the darkness, and perhaps still more if you are rushing toward the light, i wish you deep rest, carried by the spinning earth, relaxing into an embrace that we can fall asleep in, to dream of another world and wake revived to greet it.
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