Winter's Dreaming
As we enter the New Year in the Gregorian calendar, it may be helpful to remember that this is not the only New Year. The Vedic calendar doesn’t have the New Year beginning until spring, when all of life is approaching organic newness. In the same way, the Vedic day begins at dawn while the day in the West begins in the middle of the night.
By way of these designations assigned to Time, different cultures are planting different seeds. Since the moment of initiation is the seed of what is beginning it would make more sense to ‘plant’ a year or a day when Nature is brightening, rather than in the coldest, darkest time of the daily or yearly cycle. The structure or rhythms of a culture matters, and you can see that in the West the basic structure of the calendar already puts us out of sync with Nature. So that even if we are driven to align ourselves with natural cycles, the entire society in which we are embedded will be continually be pulling us out of that more organic rhythm.
Nonetheless, I think we can all welcome a doorway right now. Even the whiff of a new beginning—however manufactured it might be—can lend a little hope to this dense moment. If we must plant our seeds in the middle of winter and the dark of night, so be it: let’s make them as beautiful and as hearty as possible so that they might survive (even in a dormant state) until spring, when Nature can take them under her wing and breathe life into what are now quiet wishes.
Winter is an excellent season for wishes and dreams. It is the dreaming season, after all, when Nature drives everything deeper into itself. The shoots of Spring are brewing in you already, whether you’re aware of it or not. Make space for that silent, internal growth by touching down with yourself regularly. And when it seems hard to stay close to the vital part of yourself we might call soul, remember that whatever is good in culture and humans today got to us only because some of our ancestors were dedicated to the preservation of this type of beauty—and the conditions under which they fought to preserve their culture and soul were likely much more dire and devestating than ours.
Something similar is being asked of us now, though the details are different. The degradation of soul and sanity seems to accelerate exponentially all around us, and our attention becomes increasingly fractured. Sometimes it is hard even to remember what is important inside the haze of overstimulation and collective anxiety. The task now is to retain your sanity and focus inside an absolutely insane world, which grabs at your attention from all angles relentlessly. The deleterious effects of the technologies and social platforms we interact with constantly cannot be underestimated. There is an entire generation now whose life is in danger of being stolen from them—they can hardly see the world beyond their screens.
Like those that preceded us, we are asked to hold tightly to ourselves what is most essential and protect it at all costs. And though we are not forced to flee physically, as our ancestors might have been, we can easily flee in a multitude of other ways—through cyberspace, addiction, distraction. We are being asked to stay right here and not wander too far with our attention into the limitless rivulets of stimulation that hook us, only to dead end in some dry field, having wasted us.
The pulls are strong and the stakes are high. Preservation of soul and the fending off of the mediocrity that our society almost demands will require your full attention. Winter is the training ground for this dreaming into soul, spirit and memory which can become the type of full blown creativity (come spring) we will need to imagine a reality worth living in.
The practice of dreaming can be very small: you might eliminate one energy-wasting activity from your day or week and instead dedicate that time to a meditative or creative practice that feeds you. If you can carve even a very small space for such a practice into your life now, who knows what it could grow into in one, five or ten. years time!