“Solvitur Ambulando” – It is solved by walking, 2021 Labyrinth Walks, 2021 Twelthtide Labyrinth Walks (6/12), Veriditas Weekly Facilitated Online Handheld Labyrinth Walk:
This was one of the best facilitated walks. It was hosted by Barrie Gibby, Veriditas Faculty, Council and Retreat Facilitator on the theme of “Stirring the Circle.” She was accompanied live by Virginia Schenck, Vocal Artist/Sound Artist. We peeked “into the bowl of an anxious year, now draining away, and into the thin place of the unknown, lighting our way on the path ahead.”
Barrie introduced me (and 100+ other participants) to Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter”, https://wordsfortheyear.com/2015/03/02/starlings-in-winter-by-mary-oliver/
“Starlings in Winter” by Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
Lars Howlett, another host, directed us to the Krista Tippet interview of Katherine May: Katherine May — How ‘Wintering’ Replenishes | The On Being Project, https://onbeing.org/programs/katherine-may-how-wintering-replenishes/
May: I thought that was really important, actually. I wanted to make it really clear that, although a lot of Wintering is about my love of winter and my affection for the cold and even the dark, that wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season, in any weather, that it has nothing to do with the physical cold. So it was very useful from a narrative point of view to be able to start with what indeed happened, which was, on an unseasonably sunny day in September, just before my 40th birthday, when my husband fell very suddenly ill.
Tippett: Here’s one way — I thought this was such a beautiful way of — one of the many places where you describe what you’re talking about with “wintering”: “There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open you, and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. And Somewhere Else” — which is now capitalized — “Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on.”
May: That’s a key feature of enduring a wintering, I think, in that it feels like everybody else is carrying on as normal, and you’re the only one with this storm cloud over your head. And that’s a very particular feeling, because it brings up loads of emotions, I think — not just sadness, but also a sense of paranoia, a sense of humiliation, a sense that we’ve uniquely failed. And actually, whenever you start talking to people about your own winterings they start telling you about theirs, and you realize what huge community there could be, if we talked about this in a different way. But I think, for all of my life, that experience has been a feeling of falling through the cracks: being there on your own, and looking up through those cracks at the world carrying on around you.
Tippett: I think that’s also where the framing of Wintering, of the understanding of the seasonal, cyclical, of the rhythmic nature of these things, gives you a frame actually to live with it. There’s somewhere you said our winterings — as you said, not only to live with it, but to wrest from it what it can teach you. Not that you would wish for it or wish this thing for anything else, but, you said, “They are asking something of us,” our winterings. “We must learn to invite them in” and to stop wishing it were summer. But I think what you discovered that is really the hardest thing to believe, when you’re in the midst of that dark place, is that there is a summer on the other side of this; that there can be.
And then we “walked” …
We closed with comments and insights of participants.
And back to the black starlings …
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
…
I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
12.31.21
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