Traditionally, winter was the season for hibernation.
Even my technology knows this when I try to restart my computer on a cold wintry morning: its message flashes clearly on the screen ----- “hibernating”.
In early civilizations, our ancestors prepared, preserved, canned, hunted and built in the spring, in order to hunker down underground, to slow, to recharge, to rest in the icy months.
While our modern-day life doesn’t often lend itself to living in sync with the seasons, I still yearn for those rhythms of old –-- slowing down with the cold by firelight, hibernating through the short winter days and sleeping deeply through the long dark nights.
To live, to work, to breathe, to love with the seasons, aligned with the rhythms of our yearly solar cycles, and synergised by our monthly lunar ebbs and flows is natural and the way we were created to be.
In our modern world that is so fast paced, chaotic, and busy with non-stop chase, it is a challenge to find moments to quietly still and to savour slowing down ----- the sipping of a tea, the meditations by firelight, the softness of a warm bubble bath, the harmony of calming music.
It is almost as if to rest requires us first to be broken, ill or in pain.
Society subtly and not so subtly influences us and tells us that we must first be on empty and feel astray in order to justify our need to recharge, renew and return. And, yet we forget that we are “human being” before we are “human doing”. Our natural state is to be, not to do. We are allowed and even designed to restore and to rest simply because we are human beings.
Human Beings in a world of seasonal change are entitled to hibernate.
Perhaps we need to reframe our perception of brokenness to a perception of wholeness. To become whole, we think we need to be broken first. But what if our brokenness is already whole and wholesome? What if our “broken” need to rest, to find unplugged time in nature, to hibernate, is actually what makes us whole and complete human beings. That is, our original design – a design that requires reset, recharge, rest, renewal and rejuvenation. We are whole because that is our design by design, not a design flaw as society would have us think about it.
I hope that this winter season we can try to find pockets of time to embrace our traditional roots and human wholeness, as we dig deep to simply be and hibernate. To tend to home, hearth and heart. To rest in the darker seasons of life and to savour the time to reflect inward is a gift allowing us to energise for the seasons of life and sunshine ahead when our focus will naturally be more outward.
Happy Hibernation!
With full moon blessings,
Riv
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