Winter to Spring

When you let things settle – Clarity arises.

When you allow for stillness and the waiting of Winter - Spring comes.

Where I live, winter bears down with a seriously cold and heavy hand, pressing life to the ground, driving potential deep into the root to wait in vibrant, dark stillness.
The ground in late winter - when it is finally visible again after the snow melts - is compacted and so very dense and wet and congested that it looks lifeless.
But it is the very heaviness of winter  - its stabilizing downward and inward force - that makes it even POSSIBLE for seeds to sprout and new spring green shoots to arise.
It is amazing to me that the spring growth doesn't push up through the winter earth like some aggressive macho expression of domination - as one might imagine it would have to - to make it's way up through the heavy, sodden earth. Instead it arises as a balance to winter - a union of opposites. Spring arises from the winter ground as the most amazingly delicate and tender growth of the whole year  -  tiny wildflowers, impossibly soft green buds.
This same growth will surge forth in later spring and summer in a wild rushing reach for light and a mad dash to  flower and fruit.......and then return to the root. To begin again.
All of that explosion of movement, growth, and almost reckless reach for the sun would not be possible without the dark, heavy, cold hand of winter.

And the Sacred stays in relationship to and through me and all of life.  
Winter is a deep embrace of Sacredness longing to be in relationship 
to me - and to every life. 

And Spring is another form of Sacred longing..........

" the longing of the branches to lift the little buds" 

the "the longing of the arteries to purify the blood" (quotes from L. Cohen)