​Winter Listening

While winter has its joys, it is traditionally seen as a time of hardship, of cold, short days, a time of scarcity, and waiting for the warm return of spring. This year our neighbourhood has been particularly cold and particularly dry, and the winter flu has been rife. But whether it is winter sickness, or winter’s drought, or winter’s financial hardship, or a winter of change in life’s journey, winter is, says David Whyte, a time for listening. In his own winter of change he writes,

All those years forgetting how easily you can belong
to everything simply by listening.
 
And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness.
 
Silence and winter has lead me to that otherness.
 
So let this winter of listening be enough
for the new life I must call my own.
 
(from “The Winter of Listening”)

May you, this winter, with all the challenges and joys winter brings, find space to listen. And as you listen, may “silence and winter lead you to that otherness”, and in that “otherness” may you be aware that God is listening too.

~ Brian Holliday