winter – Feminism and Religion

The Dark Heart of Winter

I have long struggled with winter. I grew in Minnesota where winters were long and brutally cold. I remember hauling myself through hip-deep snowdrifts on my walk to elementary school and that was in the suburbs! The North of England, where I lived for nearly twenty years, has a much milder climate. But being so far north, I was plunged into infernal darkness from Halloween to Candlemas. It started getting dark at 3:30 in the afternoon and by 4:00 it was pitch dark. Remember those horror movies where it’s dark ALL THE TIME?? That’s Lancashire in midwinter. I felt I was trapped inside some brooding gothic novel.

Now that I’ve moved to the Silver Coast of Portugal, I get a lot more daylight in winter, but also storm winds and torrential rain. My Welsh pony is not impressed!

Winter Turns the Tide by Sara Wright

This winter has been most challenging on every level.

I am exhausted, emotionally and physically. Most of my hair has turned gray. I have become an old woman who needs to be in touch with her limitations.

On December 31st I broke my foot at three in the morning when a horrible crash awakened me to a blocked front door. I shoveled pure ice for an hour. Frantic with anxiety, I didn’t even realize that I had broken my foot until the crisis was over and the door could be opened again.

Sweet Dark Mystery of Winter by Mary Sharratt

For many years, I suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder. As soon as the clocks went back in autumn and the nights grew dark, I’d fall into a contracted space. The days seemed too impossibly short to get things done. Even though I still had the same 24 hours as I had in summer, the encroaching darkness seemed to make everything shrink and dwindle into a tiny dark point.

In autumn and winter, my energy levels are lower. I seem to need more sleep and I can’t pack as many things into a day as I can in summer. I came to dread winter as some kind of energy-sucking blackhole I fell into every year.

Katherine May’s luminous memoir Wintering addresses this whole conundrum with deep wisdom. She points out that the fallow seasons of winter and autumn are when nature rests and repairs itself. If we force ourselves to go against nature, we cause endless suffering to ourselves and others. So when the nights darken early, why not just go with the seasonal flow and accept the divine invitation to rest, reflect, and slow down?

In a similar vein, Christine Valters Painter’s book, Sacred Time: Embracing an Intentional Way of Life describes how we can live richer and more spiritually connected lives by living in harmony with the seasons of the year, the cycles of the moon, and the seasons of our lives.

Humans, like other living beings, evolved as cyclical creatures. The monthly cycles of menstruation synch female bodies with the cycles of the moon and the tides. Similarly, the arc of a woman’s life from menarche to possible pregnancy and birth-giving to menopause and the post menopausal years contains its own seasons of growth, ripening, and resting in our hard-won wisdom. Deep in our psyches, we long to surrender to the ancient rhythms of planting, growth, ripening, and lying fallow.

But our dominant culture teaches us to suppress our cyclical rhythms. We’re programmed to live our lives as though it were spring and summer all the time. We are expected to always be in the productive mode of being, bringing forth the blossoms and the fruit. Always doing and accomplishing. But being in summer mode all the time is exhausting. To be healthy and functioning, we need the energies of autumn and winter. The energies of releasing, quieting, and letting go.

As well as the outer seasons, we have inner seasons that play out in our psyches, regardless of what stage of life we’re in. For example, after the death of a loved one, you might be experiencing an inner winter. This long pandemic has plunged us into a deep collective winter.

When we go through an inner autumn or winter, sometimes we feel that there’s something wrong with us. Why can’t we just snap out of it, get over it, and move on? We might feel mired in grief or simply “stuck” and burdened with the sense that nothing is happening. Our culture trains us to believe that something should be happening all the time.

But our times of descent and inner darkness are filled with profound potential. They take us into the fertile darkness of replenishment and restoration. If we surrender to the velvet darkness, it heals us inside out. What if we allowed ourselves to just rest in the sweet dark mystery?

Western culture views time as a very linear construct, but the seasons are cyclical. We might think that the season we’re in is going to last forever. But the wheel keeps turning, no matter what. We can learn to trust that everything comes full circle in the fullness of time.

What happens if we learn to pay reverent attention to the rhythms of our day, our week, and the moon and sun cycles? Trusting the great cycles of the seasons opens us to recognize every moment as a divine invitation, a doorway into the timeless and eternal.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich, is now available wherever books and ebooks are sold. Visit her website .

The Power of Silence by Mary Sharratt

winter-stillness

In darkest midwinter, in the hectic rush of the holiday season and its often anticlimactic aftermath, I find myself craving silence and solitude. I’m in hibernation mode and want to curl up in a cave like a bear and sleep. But our modern culture is all about doingness rather than beingness. About action. And noise. Lots of noise. First the giddy celebrations and consumerist frenzy of the December holidays and then the rigorous Puritanical expectations of New Year’s resolutions. Leaping into a better, more virtuous, and hard-working self with both feet.

But are we going against nature in our mad pursuit of busyness and self improvement in this dark ebb of the year? Why not lie fallow and bask in a day or two of silence, or whatever retreat from the maddening world we can manage? After all, January is a traditional detox month, and silent meditation is the ultimate mental and spiritual detox technique.

Over the holidays, while traveling in the Azores with my husband, I went on a two week social media, internet, and news fast in an attempt to recover from my post US election trauma. Once I returned home, I embraced my silent meditation practice and allowed myself to rest in retreat mode until January 6, the traditional Twelfth Day of Christmas, when Yuletide ends. Continue reading “The Power of Silence by Mary Sharratt”

A Place for Everyone at the Table by Carolyn Lee Boyd

carolynlboyd Winter’s bone-chilling, relentless cold makes it the most treacherous season in the north when you don’t have a warm place to sleep or enough to eat. Poverty may look different in the city and the country, in various countries and continents, but it can be devastating to body, mind, and soul anywhere.

When I lived in New York City, no day went by that I wasn’t aware that people near me were hungry and homeless. When I moved to a more rural community, I found that, while small groups of volunteers ran food pantries and emergency assistance programs, many in my generally well-off town did not know that they had neighbors who were in need. While contributing to organizations that assist people around the globe is essential, clearly we must also consider what we, as human beings and especially as feminists with a focus on religion and spirituality, must do to support those who live within a few miles of us. Continue reading “A Place for Everyone at the Table by Carolyn Lee Boyd”

Sharing a Snowstorm with The Goddess of Winter by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Though our calendars indicate that we have hit spring, the 32 degree weather and the forecasted snow this coming week in New England indicate otherwise. Here you have one more winter-themed post in an effort to bid it farewell and make room for spring!

A few weeks ago, I stepped onto a platform at a train depot in the middle of a snowstorm and looked straight up into the sky. The flakes were chunky and drifted like feathers, tranquilly undisturbed on their journey by the loud and busy human world into which they were about to land. The wind was perfectly still, so as I stood, I could see each flake descend from very far above and follow it with my eyes till it reached the ground, as if some sky goddess shook them loose from heaven for me to bring safely to Earth with my guiding gaze. For the first time in my 50 years, I felt as if I were not just observing the work of Goddess, but was part of Her world, a true Co-Creator.

I have so often written of the Divinity within everyone, but never really experienced that personally. What does it mean to actually participate in Goddess while still being human? At that moment, I felt as if I was within the joy that perhaps Goddess has as She witnesses her most exquisitely beautiful creations. Yet I never felt as if I had left the everyday realm in body, mind, and spirit; never had I become other than my very ordinary self to partake in this moment. The train arrived, I stepped onto it, and carried on with my day, though I am still pondering the meaning of that memory.

I came to know Divinity from Nature, especially Michigan winters and their extreme cold. I grew up in a liberal church that encouraged us to forge our own relationship with God/dess, and mine was always as She was reflected in Nature. While spring and summer, with their blossoms and fruits, flashing fish swimming in lakes, and tall pines making cathedrals in the woods, were beautiful reminders of the loveliness of Creation, winter seemed to me to be the greater manifestation of Nature’s power and essence. Even as a child, frostbitten fingers and the magnificence of shining fields of snow in the sun taught me that all living beings must understand that they are one element of Nature and therefore Goddess, not Her ruler, and seek their proper place while celebrating Her abundant gifts.

As I became older, the many complexities of winter began to coalesce into a winter goddess image uniquely meaningful for me. Winter kills, but also gives life to those plants needing the cold to grow in the spring. Winter is essential for balance, not only in regulating Earth’s ecosphere, but cold also regulates the temperature of our bodies. Winter is the artist of intense beauty in the infinite designs of snowflakes as well as the grace and majesty of ice formations. The more I learned of winter’s many facets, the more I realized that this winter goddess was the self I strove to be – a healer, a life-giver, a bringer of balance and maker of beauty. This manifestation of Goddess in Nature as winter gave me the Divine face I needed to see in order to begin to be with Her as a Co-Creator.

This awakening moment came just as I am realizing that I need to grow into being a Co-Creator if I am to be effective as an agent of change in this world. As Co-Creator with Goddess, and her manifestation in Nature, I see that I need to take responsibility for doing what I can to benefit all beings, even those far away on the other side of the globe, as if I were standing next to each woman in her time of need and knowing that she is standing next to me at mine. Just as in Nature, all beings are interconnected in the ecosystem, so are we all one in our increasingly global social, cultural and spiritual human system.

As a Co-Creator with Goddess, I must think not only about how my decisions affect our planet and humans of today or tomorrow, but how what I do affects, in some way, every generation to come even onto billions of years. Just as Nature exists in deep time, so do our souls and spirits when we see beyond the tiniest dot that represents our lives in time’s real vastness. Time is not measured in the decades of my life, but in millennia and beyond.

As Co-Creator with Goddess, I know that every woman’s voice must be heard. Just as in Nature every being “sings” its unique message by fulfilling its niche in the universal ecosystem, so must we thoughtfully and joyfully use the voices of our lives to express all our innate and unique wisdom. When I think of myself as Co-Creator, I am unafraid to speak with the spiritual power and authority that is the birthright of women spiritual leaders in many times and places but which are so often not honored in our own.

I am about to have a birthday that many people believe marks a passage into another stage of life. Perhaps this is Goddess’s birthday gift to me. This experience was not one I worked for or expected; it appeared when I needed it. Truly experiencing ourselves as Co-Creator with Goddess helps us transform into the women our special gifts demand that we be and gives us a perspective and sense of power that is sorely needed if we are to heal ourselves and our planet. What is your “snowstorm,” or life experience that reminds you of the honor, responsibility and joy of truly being a Co-Creator? Who are you when you are Co-Creator with Her?

Carolyn Lee Boyd is a human services administrator, herb gardener, and writer whose work focuses on the sacred in the everyday lives of women. Her essays, short stories, memoirs, reviews and more have been published in numerous print and online publications. You can read more of her work at her blog, www.goddessinateapot.com.

A Sojourn in Antartica by Marcia Mount Shoop

Ok, so it’s not Antarctica, it’s Indiana, but it sure feels like Antarctica lately.

At least it’s what I figure Antarctica must feel like: bone chilling wind that can cause hypothermia and frost bite in a matter of minutes; everything as far as the eye can see white—sometimes no horizon, or blue sky, or any distinction between the celestial world and ours. Continue reading “A Sojourn in Antartica by Marcia Mount Shoop”