It's Still Winter

Covering most of the width of the 5”x7” card is a bowl cut from an old blue jean leg. In the bowl are former pieces of material, now threads barely holding together. While there’s more above the bowl, what hit me hardest was the word beneath it. “Unravel.” I was furious, far from my typical response to receiving my monthly offering of art and spiritual practice from Melanie Weidner’s Brave Joy Collective. When I pulled January’s card from the envelope—let’s just say it was not what I wanted.

“Unravel” image used by permission of Melanie Weidner. Check out her post about it at https://listenforjoy.com/blogs/blog/unraveling-not-yet-mending. You can also subscribe to her Brave Joy Collective to receive original art monthly with a spiritual practice card suggesting ways to use the art as part of your daily practice.

I mean, hasn’t enough unraveled already? Every institution is unraveling around us. People are unraveling. Our bodies are unraveling. What more can we take?

We’ve learned so much in the past two years. I know I’m being taught about radical trust, about how little I really am in control, about the daily places I have choices I haven’t been willing to acknowledge as choice places. There are lessons we’re learning about how we live together, about compassion and keeping one another safe and well, about cultural assumptions we carry to everyone’s detriment. We’re learning lessons about how we live with this earth we are all dependent on for our lives. Lessons abound. And lessons need time to be processed, and lived into, work we can’t do when we’re being knocked over by wave after wave of new learning opportunities!

If we’re paying attention at all, we know we’re fundamentally different now than we were before shutdown, before everything we knew as normal life began falling apart as we watched. Surely, as the new year was dawning, surely it was time to rest and let those lessons sink in. But no, we were hit with yet another wave called omicron. And I watch as people around me keep being knocked over by personal waves of cancer and anxiety and depression and financial distress and laws passed to make people less safe. While on the news, stories of threats to life and health and basic human rights are the norm.

My anger was short-lived. I simply want it to be spring. I want it to be time for new growth and for really living into what we’ve been learning. And, it’s still winter. Winter is the time to rest from our labors. Winter is the time to let everything lie fallow. We want to rush back into what we used to do. Or to rush ahead into creating something new. It just is not time. In winter, as much as I hate to admit it, things need to unravel a bit more before spring can begin to appear.

Right now we need to rest. We need to say yes to what is still unraveling. Because spring is coming. And we’re going to need all our energy to step into the newness, into places we can’t even imagine now. We have been gathering the pieces we need to create what is next. Soon it will be time. Soon we’ll be ready. The creativity required to reinvent institutions and heal the trauma of this world needs down time, fallow time. As much as it is not what I want, we need winter right now. Melanie’s word “unravel” is the right one. She wanted badly for the art piece to be about mending. Not yet.

So we rest. We hold a container for all that is unraveling, and we offer it to the One who weaves all things into good. The One who gives rest and, when it’s time, calls forth creativity in abundance. We’re preparing for new life breaking forth all around us. Wait and watch. Watch and trust.