Pratyahara (for the Winter Solstice)

 

“I spend more time with myself now because there is more of myself to be with.”

Read in a book in a bin

 

 I feel swaddled by the long thick darkness of this season.  I am drawn in to rest after the early sunset, with yoga, with a hot bath.  I rise early to watch the sun rise in the East, some days in a burst of pink, orange, and yellow other days an easy milky blue.  Early afternoon, I watch the sun setting in the opposite window pulled into the melancholy dark blue that deepens into black. I always want the darkest blue to linger a bit longer. We have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off so my time empties during the darkest part of the year into a flow of long walks, hot tea, writing, yoga, and more hot baths. There will be visits with friends and family but no travel this year.  My life has become quieter during pandemic – and quieter still during this dark season.  I find it easy and nourishing to be with myself.  It gives me time to meet my fears with openness and compassion, to find that midnight blue at the edge of darkness.  

 

There is an invitation during this dark season to get at the root of all things troubling.  I let go of the need for understanding and enter the free fall of mystery and paradox. To be transformed by grief is to find the door out of the closed room that leads out into the mountain meadow. In their own way, things ripen in the cold and dark. Not from the sun but by the heat of the woodstove. It is the season of pratyahara, withdrawing inward, to find renewal in the coming in out of the cold. Light a candle and see how soothing the flickering light is, an invitation to see things in a softer light.

 

Pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit find an easy time being together with space between them in a mash of color not like the picture on the box. I somehow find room for the sweet mother who like the moon shines but distantly, the father more like the sun who brings everything to life but burns and then disappears, relatives who have said the same things over and over and over again for fifty years. Sadness mixes with joy just like midnight blue at its edge pulls at the darkness.  We don’t even long for the light blue sunlit sky when we have this kind of richness. It makes all the little worries fall away. We hold in the cave of the heart, that deeper knowledge about death.  That this breath, this step, this cup of tea is precious, more precious than we have ever imagined.  One seeks nothing more than a good cup of sweet hot tea.