Wintering
Wintering
The silver birches’ cascades of golden leaves reflect the oblique light of this autumn’s sunshine. Red berries are abundant and the birds look happy. There is beauty everywhere and yet there is also an acute loss when autumn equinox (21/09) arrives. The light filled, carefree days of summer are gone and many of us find it difficult to remain active, energised and positive during the dark, cold months to come.
We stand at a threshold and prepare to enter the darker, quieter half of the year. First we stand with gratitude for nature’s abundance, the golden grain and fruit harvest. We stand and observe as the leaves turn colour and flutter to the ground. Equinoxes are a time of balance in nature, light and dark are balanced although we know that the growing season is finishing and we see more the dance of opposites in nature, death and decay but also the beauty and wholeness of seeds, seedpods and seed heads and their promise of wholeness and return. This is the theme of the season, the mystery and balance of opposites. It is a good time to scavenge for mushrooms and herbs and learn herb potions to keep healthy in the winter.
Some feel acutely the loss of light and warmth. I find that it is helpful to go into the winter with the images brought by the year’s festivals. Michaelmas (29/09) announces the change and asks us to face our dragons with courage and resilience. Then comes All Saints day (32/10). I like to commemorate All Saints not as Halloween night, but in the Mexican way, honouring our dead and remembering our ancestors. When we imagine a line of people behind us, all from the same bloodline, we can visualise where we come from, which qualities and problems we have inherited, which we have brought ourselves. There is great force and resilience within a bloodline. We could light a candle for the ancestors and invoke their help to face the darkness ahead.
Martimas (11/11) happens about the same time as Diwali and teaches us to light a small lantern. The light shines from within the lantern. Can we temporarily bring within the light from outside? The golden light of a candle shows something about the quality of being contained and able to glow with warmth. Every little light we bring to the onset of the year’s darkness will help to bring warmth and light to the dark that promises to engulf us.
After Martimas the festivals will always bring light.
Advent announces Christmas. It teaches about preparing and waiting and if we enter in its most spiritual quality, we learn to make, prepare and expect. Some people make the Christmas cake at this period, or the Christmas pudding for next year. My neighbour, Louise, makes her wonderful Christmas puddings. She lets them mature for a whole year and I know that next year I will be given a Christmas pudding to take with me to Brazil and give to my mother who loves it. I meet with friends to make paper stars and lanterns or dip bee’s wax candles. Often someone announces that knitting season has started and we knit Christmas presents in the evenings, hats and scarves. We prepare for a family gathering, we get together with precious friends. We gather light around us and face the frosty weather outside.
When Christmas comes I find myself resenting the commercial overtones that our modern times put on it. I want to find simplicity and warmth, togetherness and love. But it is not easy in a very materialistic world. So we try to include some spiritual gatherings in our days and perhaps service to others.
I spoke about the Christian festivals as they are easily available in the culture of the country I live in, but lately I try to skip the religious content and concentrate in the spiritual truth that each festival of the year contains. Always linked to the natural world, this spiritual truth is what nourishes our souls.
The autumn as the entrance to the darker months holds the mystery of light and dark, life and death and its festivals try to teach us the joy and comfort of bringing the light within.
The advent teaches us about waiting and preparation and of compassion and solidarity.
This season encourages us to find community and support as our awareness and focus shifts inward.
Connection to our destiny task
It is important to connect to our destiny task. That task can be elusive and difficult to see at times, but once we connect to it, meaning floods into our whole life and we understand the difficulties and successes of our work in the world.
When I look into my search for what I wanted to do and work with in the world, I realise a clear path. Clear now when I am on the brink of my 70th birthday, but very unclear for quite a while. I see how I studied law to heal an injustice and lack of balance in my country, which had been for almost 20 years in the throes of a military dictatorship where safety was precarious and truth was hidden. I could not realise my task in the political reality I lived in so I became a Primary teacher. When I look back to those first years teaching children I understand two things:
I did not have the resources then to teach young children -the most noble undertaking in teaching; I only became able to teach very young children years later, within the framework of a very therapeutic education devised by Rudolf Steiner, then I thrived as an early years teacher.
As I became a good teacher to children aged 10/11 years old my teaching was always imbued with creativity and healing.
What prompted me to write about that special connection to our destiny was a visit to Greece.
My first trip to Greece was the realisation of a childhood dream as, since I read as a child of 9 or 10 about the 10 works of Heracles, my life has been inhabited by the imagery of greek mythology.
We decided to stay in the Peloponnese, the peninsula between the Ionian Sea and the Aegean Sea forming the southern part of the mainland of Greece. A part of Greece full of the ancient sites of my imagination. At first I wanted to see everything and go everywhere. My overwhelming feelings of belonging to the ancient culture of that sunny place leaving me disoriented with longing. I did not go everywhere in the Peloponnese. I did not have the time and also I could not honour that experience by rushing it.
I visited Athens for three days and spent the other four days in the second ‘leg’ of the peninsula, visiting Mycenae, Nemea, Epidaurus, and ancient Corinth. It was in Epidaurus that I met my present, buried deep in the ruins of an ancient important healing centre, considered the cradle of medicinal arts. This place was dedicated to Asclepius the god of medicine and healing. What impressed me was the wholistic nature of healing in ancient Greece where all our lower senses were considered, Movement, Sense of life, Balance and Touch. They had a gymnasium for exercise, a restaurant offering different diets according to individual healing needs, baths and water treatments to purify the body, and sleep, induced by a priest. During sleep the god Asclepius would come to the patient, touch him and heal him. Finally they had a theatre, still there and astonishingly preserved, almost intact. Theatre would provide the healing through catharsis, and the healing sound of poetry ( Speech).
I spent a long time sitting at the amphitheatre and experiencing the powers of that ancient sacred place of healing. In that place I realised that what connects all my work in the world is healing and creativity.
I thank Asclepius for having led me there and also here to my present, where healing and salutogenesis is always present in my daily work and form the thread that goes from my attempt at being a lawyer to my work as a biography worker, counsellor and psychotherapist.