Winter dawn: Mountain scripture

In winter before the sun truly rises, when sunlight strikes the slopes to the west but the sky is still pale, when the cold is so deep that snow squeaks underfoot, I walk to the ridge top.

Mercifully, there is little wind. I reach the grandmother pine tree, wisened and gnarled by her rugged life on top of a rocky ridge. Six hundred years she has stood here. She… yes, that’s my human thinking and yet that’s the feeling I get from this venerable being. The things she must have seen!

Pumpkin ridge and mount emily - image by arie farnam

I am thankful for the winter, for the cold. In these days of worsening fires and droughts, any cold or snow is to be valued. But this winter is mild. The cold has come only in a few intense blasts, like this one. The snow is scant and stale.

Each morning I still meditate, despite my daily life descending into a blur of chaos, conflict, grief and struggle with various bureaucracies. I still cling to that one bit of routine and stability. And the heart of that is gratitude.

I speak my thanks for my health, my body, my mind, my heart, my soul—even on days when I don’t feel so sure of any of that. I still give thanks.

I give thanks for my family, even when the grief and strain of their struggles has pushed me far beyond my breaking point. It’s a principle, but that thanks is sometimes hollow.

I give thanks for the abundance of my life, even though my existence which once spanned continents has contracted to the cramped confines of intractable restrictions and endless daily tasks. Still, my special chai tea, a piece of salmon and tomatoes from my garden still ripening on the windowsill halfway through winter make me conscious of blessings.

But that is nothing beside the thanks I give for this valley, the mountain, the ridge, the trees, the land and the open sky. Even on the worst days, when I can’t stop the tears falling all through my meditation, my heart sings in gratitude for the land and the sky. So many years I spent far away from this place, and I did value and care for the land there, but always this place was in my heart, even when I didn’t know it. And now, when times are hard beyond hard, my gratitude for the land and sky surpasses words.

I touch the prickly spines of pine needles. She gives me three small cones, hard and spiky, sharp in the cold. I pour out a stream of green gold tea, lit with the dawn, steam billowing from it. Drink and know you are honored, grandmother.

It is Imbolc time, the holiest part of the year for me because of my lady, Brigid. It is a quiet time without great community festivities but dear to my heart. Cold still binds the land like stone, but light is returning. The dawn rays are pale wheat, a promise of abundance and spring coming.

Maybe someday there will be space to write again. Maybe spring will come to my life. I still live in the depths of a barren and desolate time. Most days, I don’t think I will have health or years enough to start over when I’m finally free of this toil and sorrow.

But in rare moments, when I see a sunrise or a moon nearly full or the sky free and unbound, I say to myself that this winter must pass someday. Spring may not be the same as it was. Rains are scarce. The heat may come too early. But each season passes.

That is what the scripture of this mountain tells me.

Guided meditation for a ecologically equitable future

I recently led a discussion at Anglo-American University in Prague during their devoted Eco-week. First, I was asked to talk about local interconnection and food sustainability because of my urban homesteading experience, which is still quite modest compared to many. Later the request was broadened to include “guided meditation.”

Image by Arie Farnam

How, I wondered, was I going to combine these two topics into one experience for the students. In the end, I gave a short presentation about renewing the World-War-Two era effort of Victory Gardens as a constructive response to the climate crisis. The gist of it is that some forty percent of British food was produced in small private gardens during the war, given much less productive practices than we have available today.

Producing 40 to 50 percent of our food supply extremely locally, in sub-urban and even urban environments is possible and highly desirable, since this type of production can use very few resources and be carbon neutral, resulting in huge savings in the carbon-intensive agricultural sector.

Then, I expanded the discussion to include local interconnection and the wide variety of possibilities for mitigating and adapting to the climate crisis. Because this requires creative and innovative thinking en mass, I developed this guided meditation to use with the students.

I will copy it here for you to use in your activities. It is a share-and-share-alike text, which requires only that you make reference to the fact that I wrote it and allowed it to be shared, with a link provided to www.ariefarnam.com in any materials.

Guided meditation:

Find a comfortable way to sit. You can sit on the floor or rest your head. It is usually helpful to close your eyes. This is a journey of imagination and sensory exploration. Seeing and hearing too much may interfere.

As you relax into your position, pay attention to your breath. Consciously inhale slowly. Feel the air moving over your nasal passages and down into your lungs. Slowly breathe out.

Can you imagine your breath as a color, cool air going in and warming up, then flowing back out?

Now you start to build a picture in your mind of a place you would like to be sitting. This is a place outdoors. You may be with other people or alone. This may be a human-inspired place or a wild place, but it is in a time when humans have turned serious attention to tackling ecological crises in a way that allows nature to heal and humans to live with integrity.

Relax your expectations. Put out your intention for a picture of such a time and place. Don’t try too hard to force it.

The place is growing up around you, a place with signs of humans living well with nature.

Notice each of your senses. What does it smell like outdoors in this time? Inhale. Keep breathing deeply.

What do you feel under you. What are you sitting on in this dream place? Feel it with your fingers. Is there a grain to it or is it grass or earth or stone. Feel the solidness supporting you.

Is it warm or cool where you are? What does the air feel like on your skin?

What do you hear? Are you alone or with other people? What sound does the wind or breeze make? Are there sounds of animals or people?

Now let images come. What do you see in a time and place where people live well with nature? What do you see around you? What does the sky look like? Are their big trees? What other plants do you see?

In this place, you can stand and walk around, even while you’re still sitting here. Feel the ground beneath you. You may be walking a little slowly, since this world is new to you.

Do you see animals or people? What are they doing? Are there homes? Are there fences? Is there a road nearby? How do people live? How do other animals live?

Greet people you see? Do you know them? Are they in a hurry? Are they content? Do any of them stop to talk to you?

Take a moment to be with them. Does anyone want to take your hand or hug you? Is there anything you would like to ask them about life in this time when people live well with nature? Think on it and ask. Listen to see if they answer.

You can continue walking around in this world and asking questions. Feel the sunlight on your face. Feel the air. Smell it. Listen to the sounds. Taste some of the food people offer you. Look into their faces and see what their expressions tell you. Look at what they do, how they move and how they live.

Slowly draw away from the image. See it as two-dimensional. It is a picture. You are not inside it anymore. Take the picture and fold it gently and put it in your pocket. This world you have seen, a time when people live well with nature is something you can pull out when you need to remember what you want to move toward.

The nature of sunrise is to be unrealistically bright, full of promise and always recurring

Gray light seeps into the darkness. Ice glistens at the coldest hour of the day.

A breath--too cold but bringing a whisper of freedom.

Then a ribbon of brilliance along the horizon.

Creative Commons image by Nicolas Gent

A quickened heartbeat.

Finally color--first pink, then peach and gold, spilling ever more rapidly, like cascading joyful music, like the chatter of children and birds, like waterfalls. The sky lights up.

Ice crystals glitter and sparkle. Every branch is outlined in light, the earth bright and crackling. Frozen mist curls in the low places, painting pictures of another world. The first footprints are precious but also a desecration. There's an urge to dance but cold muscles refuse.

This is sunrise in winter. The night is long and the sun is unnaturally, painfully bright. The nature of sunrise is to be too bright.

It is also its nature to be full of promise. There is a sense at the hour of daybreak that all things are possible. Goodwill and hope come swiftly, especially if there's coffee. 

We promise ourselves that things will go well today. We plan work and play, eager to cram in more than can possibly be accomplished in the hours ahead. Like New Year's resolutions, the plans of dawn are full of conviction and vigor before the lazy slug-a-beds of duties and troubles reawaken a little later.

This moment of fresh enthusiasm is necessary to the day, just as it is necessary to the year.

In some circles, it has become fashionable to ridicule New Year's resolutions. "We're all adults here after all. We know that people don't really improve their habits. They start but they don't last." 

It's the nature of sunrise to be too bright, too enthusiastic and ultimately illusive. 

And yet, there is one thing that "us grown-ups" tend to forget. It is also the nature of sunrise to be endlessly recurring. Sunrise may be just one moment and it's hope may be fleeting.

But it always comes back. And that is not fleeting.

That endures.

People don't improve their habits in one sunrise or one New Year's resolution. But they do in a hundred sunrises or a thousand. 

Five years ago, I started to change my habits. I got up early to do spiritual practice and meditation. At first it only happened sometimes. I tried to get up too early and greedily get many other things done before the children woke up and the lack of sleep brought me to my knees. 

I sprinted and faltered--for months at a time. I started again and again.

Now I have been getting up just a half hour early for three years. I've missed a few days due to acute illnesses but I can count those on my fingers.

These past three years have been among the hardest I've lived through, due to circumstances beyond my control. I don't know how I would have made it this far without those early morning moments of peace. 

I am deeply thankful for sunrises, particularly that they reliably return and never abandon me. 

Blue Moon / Imbolc wishes

One of our family traditions for Imbolc (February 2) is to write wishes on slips of paper and put them into a wish jar for the year. First, we pull out last year's wishes to see if any of them have come true, and then we drop in new ones. It's surprising how sometimes the wildest wishes do manifest themselves in some way.

We make a point of going beyond "realistic wishes." When you wish, wish in full. This is what wishes are for and it matters. Imbolc is a special time for wishes and for prophesy. The full moon is also a magical time for wishes and a blue moon may have particular potency. 

This year I have decided to spread my pleasant wishes as far as possible. Here are my wishes for you. Feel free to share them and wish the same to your friends and loved one's. 

• I wish you a clear night sky to view this super blue moon. 
• I wish you a bright dawn full of hope and promise.
• I wish you comfort and shelter in rough weather and the freedom to roam in fine weather
• I wish you lively consciousness, a resilient body, the love of acceptance and surety of purpose.

And I also have wishes for the world at this turning:: 

• I wish everyone could simultaneously wake up full of hope and compassion one morning, so that no one's small gesture of kindness would be rebuffed and the sense of hope would just keep going.
• I wish all the pundits and news anchors would decide to speak honestly from their hearts and deepest convictions. 
• I wish the people who run big corporations would suddenly all stop and consider the future of their own descendants and decide to tackle climate change seriously with us right now.
• I wish that human leaders should be held accountable to law and the democratic will of the people this year. 
• I wish for all humans to become aware of our close connection to plants, animals, the land, the air and the water around us, so that we make decisions that will give us the life we actually want.
• I wish for all people to be free from addictions as well as from the dissonance between beliefs and actions.
• I wish all the lonely and outcast people could find each other and become the biggest, most accepting and most joyful tribe on earth. 

You may laugh at my unrealistic wishes. But they are real, not just platitudes. This is the breath of hope.

Yule carol to a 250-year-old Slovak tune

This time before the Winter Solstice looks like a gloomy time at our latitude. The sun is far to the south and even at midday it sits near the horizon. Sunday will see the dark of the moon and arguably the darkest night, though the Solstice is a few days away. There will be only stars to light this long night.

Creative Commons image by fdecomite of Flickr.com

Monday will usher in a tiny crescent of moon after sunset in the far western sky. And each day after that the crescent will grow and be higher in the sky as night falls.

On the 21st the sun will give the least light in the northern hemisphere and it will stay that way for three exceptionally dark days. It is a time of stars, of small, twinkling lights and of solace in the darkness. 

And yet, people have celebrated the
Winter Solstice since prehistoric times in one form or another. Music of wonder and hope belongs to this season and I am always in search of more songs that celebrate the sun and earth, the moon and the stars. When I can't find a song that fits just right, I have to put my nose to the grindstone and write my own.

Below you can find the lyrics I wrote for this Winter Solstice. It's a song for rising at dawn--not that early, so not hard to do--on the Winter Solstice and going out with a mug of something hot and spicy into the cold to greet the sun. 

The tune is from a 250-year-old Slovak carol by František Sušil. You can listen to the melody here and follow along with the words. It's meant to be sung as a lively tune, but it is easy enough even for those of us without a great deal of musical talent.

Rise in good cheer

 

Rise in good cheer children of earth

Bring a coal to kindle the hearth

Hail the rising winter sun

Star of hope and our rebirth

Greet the light this winter's morn'

Star of hope and our rebirth

Through midnight's shadow I may go

Storm of sleet and wind and snow

I seek a light to guide my way

Star of waking, light and truth

Shining at the darkest hour

Star of waking, light and truth