AllThingsFlow
They called it ‘the year of the Horse’, this year. The year when visions and dreams would push through to manifest, where all of us called into action, who had any hidden wish tucked away in old drawers, would feel compelled to bring them out there into the world, a drive and energy supporting true change, empowerment, challenges, life force in full flow, creativity at its most fertile peak.
Well, whatever our beliefs, whatever our sense of this year as it begun, I truly feel I have witnessed and experienced those changes, that drive, those powerful pushes to birth and manifest what had been hidden or forgotten, the tremendous creative, fertile wave that seems to have swept through all of these past twelve months. A whirlwind of fullness, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes almost too much to bear, overwhelming.
It is in the nature of my work and the way I live my life to notice patterns and themes running through, brought by my clients (my teachers) and all beings I encounter along the way.
Many I know and close to me have made radical choices this year, have dared radical challenges, invested more vital energy, experienced more force, into the drive to live more authentically, in whatever form this was possible or longed wished for, or necessary! This may have manifested in relationships, work, traveling, moving away, training, starting new ventures, and with some of this also finding new tribes, cutting ties, losing some, acquiring some.
Surprises and gifts, I have seen, deep grief and fear and amazing courage, joyful celebration, unexpected reunions, excruciating separations, wondrous healing, heroic integrity, irrepressible uprisings and extremes of both human blindness and solidarity.
Few, including friends, have experienced the heart wrenching loss of a loved, important one. Some have found love, themselves, parts of their lives that seemed lost, Home, ground, purpose. But whichever the guise and direction this whirlwind has taken for any of those I know, not one single event or emotional experience has seemed to know mid measures – they all seemed ‘full on’, intense, urgent, 3D, all-or-nothing, now-or-never, no depth spared, fast and loud.
In my own life this wave of uncompromising change has had me shaken from the old hinges and reassembled in alignments I could have not consciously engineered with such timing and precision. The latest fortress conquered, my music has flown back into my life from all those abandoned places in the distant past, and I sing again, I share the music our hearts can make, and the gift of love to challenge and hold me as it joins paths.
At the end of such constellated year, I have also witnessed and experienced the exhaustion of it all, a satisfied one or otherwise, but still the sign of a year worked and lived hard and high and intensely. There seems to be a heightened need to rest, retreat, restore and land, a wish to gather amongst like minded ones, to be stiller, to fall into the arms of Winter for a little while, to take stock, to honour and ‘hear’ what the call is now, where, with whom, what’s needed of us next.
Nature is doing this right now. The trees withdraw their energy from branches and outer ends to focus it on their core, inward, into the roots deep in the ground. Everything falls stiller and quieter, moss covers the shine of rocks, animals retreat and stock up their nourishment for this time of longer darkness and colder temperatures, to rest, restore, replenish, let it all fall asleep and renew itself. Sleep is restorative and healing, dreaming is important for our regeneration, processing, metabolising, resetting and creating.
So from the depth of my Winter Well, aware of our many connecting tunnels and threads even in our separate lives, and from the glow of the fire in there to restore my soul and bones from so much moving and journeying, here surrounded by the Woods I love and that inspire and teach me, I want to share their simple blessing to take into the New Year.
May we be nourished by love in any form coming into our lives and may we recognise these
