Endless gray days.  Waiting … waiting ….waiting in the dark silence. For what do I wait, I wonder?

I try hard to love winter, I really do!. I try to embrace the opportunity to slow down and enter more fully into the quiet of the moment(s), the weeks that stretch on in the gray-browness of December, January and February.  But it’s SO hard, sometimes.  Often, actually.

Many years ago when I began to realize how this time of year could negatively affect me, I purposefully began developing hobbies that I would reserve for the cold months.  So I fool around with paints and canvases, or paint and walls, and I sew, and I try to knit, and I work on learning new languages or cooking methods.  (I used to bake a great deal, but then discovered what a negative impact THAT could have!).   I make  a habit of going to lunch every week with a different someone. Especially important now, as I work from home by myself.

Of course Covid will continue to insist on inserting it’s nastiness, too!

Waiting …. An appropriate topic for Advent, these weeks before Christmas, isn’t it?  It is in the waiting, in dealing with darkness and colder temperatures that we are given the opportunity to go further within, aren’t we?  It is a time to reflect and to muse, to ponder, as Mary the Mother did.  To maybe question our divine one, or at least ourselves, as to what is going on.  To wonder how and in what direction we are meant to journey in the future. 

I realize all this, and yet too often I still don’t really like it.  I would rather be out in the sunshine, rejoicing in green growing things, or wandering in the woods.   Although, on decent days in winter, I DO wander in the woods as much as I can.  And then I admire the structures of all those beautiful trees I love – the branches that support so much life, the trunk that holds it all together, and the roots within which even in the deepest darkness of the season, so much is happening.   

As with the trees, it is in the dark waiting that we grow, I firmly tell myself.  The waiting gives us time to learn to become the new thing we are becoming, the new being that is unfolding – assuming, of course, that we agree to do so!  Always that choice!

And our society?  For what are we waiting right now?  What new thing are we becoming?  Perhaps that is part of the frustration this year, the discouragement and depression that seems to surround me.  ARE we being formed by this waiting?  ARE we choosing to move on into new life?  Or do we insist on remaining where we sit, clinging desperately to what we think “always has been and always must be,” not remembering (for we know this, intuitively if in no other way) that change is the only thing that always has been?  Will we insist on remaining in this state of Covid isolation, angst and divisiveness forever?  Or will we choose for the good and for the growth we all need?

We wait.  We wait, perhaps, for a savior to lead us out of the darkness.  We throw up Christmas lights and Hanukkah candles, light Advent wreaths, and celebrate the darkest day of the year at the solstice, relieved that it indicates a subtle shift in the future …. all in the search for light. 

Where is our light? Are we willing to go deeper within in order to realize that it is there, nascent, silent, able to be discovered in those liminal places of in between if only we search, and are willing to ponder, to consider, to trust … and like Mary, Joseph, Elizabeth and ultimately even Zechariah, to say “YES!”?. 

I hope so.  And I wait … more or less patiently.