a holy day

Today is Winter Solstice, the shortest, darkest day on the wheel of the year. It's the day I had my fourth baby and it's the day he was cremated exactly seven years later. Today is a holy day.

On this cold, snowy Solstice day, I want to savor any sense of wholeness that I can feel. All day long I have been imagining how life would look if I was completely whole -- with no limitations, beyond time and unaffected by current reality. What would a perfect day look like, what would I be doing, where would I live, who would I love. Tonight by candlelight I will write my wholeness into being. I'm thinking that when all is said and done, things may not look much different than how they are now. And that's good.

Toward contentment. xx

a sacred pause

Every so often, I do a writing exercise comparing "now" with the same time one year ago. How things have changed, what has ended and what is new. If I'm in a great place, the words come easy...if not, I have to go deeper.

 

I am sewing less now...but woke up the other day wanting to make a simple star. It might have had something to do with a line that I recently read and loved...."the way to the stars is not outward but rather inward."  

I miss sewing but know it's a cycle and it probably won't be long before things change.

A scrap of blue velvet for one side and a handstitched 9-patch for the other, stuffed with wool and decorated with beads and blue pins.

I am better about labeling things now.

                          

I'm eating more roots now...baking several beets at a time to have on hand for lunches, one a day. I think I'd rather have a beet a day than an apple a day. But that could change at any time.

I'm knitting way more now and I can knit socks now. That's my first pair in the basket waiting for sock blockers to come all the way from England. I know you don't really need sock blockers but I see it as part of the experience.

I know my camera has a painting filter now, turned on by accident on Thanksgiving Day. All my photos from that day are like this. 

My youngest daughter and I are planning her wedding now.

Sometimes I feel that I'm doing less of everything I normally do. Some of that is because of wedding planning but it's also the shorter days and longer nights that gently lull us into rest and restoration. I've heard this time referred to as a sacred pause. And then I remember that trees only appear to be dormant while their roots continue to grow, all the while sinking deeper into the earth. Maybe we too grow deeper as we take our sacred pause. xx