40 60% 40% 5mph windrose SSW bar steep rise dewpoint 27 Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon Ordinary Time
A great wind blows through Andover today. Literally. 40 mph gusts. The grass in my window bends to the ground, leaves swirl up from the ground and my shed door, left open yesterday, bangs against the frame. A change in the weather, air coming from the arctic.
This is the brown season, a season in which the only garden color is green. The bleakness corresponds to a certain wildness in my soul and I revel in it. Lower the lights, crank up the wind, bring on the snow. Then, then we can get down to it, the travel toward the deep places, the caverns and secret gardens hidden by too much light.
This is holiseason, a time when external beauty and easy movement vanish, clearing away a swath of maya, leaving us bare before ourselves. The Winter Solstice is the well, the sublime and darkest moment. St John of the Cross gave us the phrase “dark night of the soul.” He saw the dark night as a place of challenge, of despair and hopelessness, the extinction, or near extinction of faith, salvaged only by re-emergence into the light of faith. This is one ancient trail. There is another that sees the dark night as the very place, the site of connection with the sacred depth. Here in the darkness from which we came and toward which we move our entire life we embrace fecundity, the richness inherent in blackness.
