Sophia's Children

A perfect set of musings for the dark moon, dark of night, or dark of Winter (whether you’re in seasonal Winter, as we are now here in New York, or in the Dark Night or winter passage of some life-cycle you’re living through).

The busy mind — always skittering here and there along the surface — can’t find its way through such times, and intuitive insights, wise guidance, and creative inspiration are gestated only in the womb of darkness, of night, of Winter, heard only in our still listening.

There are many portals into the still place of listening – our own breath, or the spiral staircase of a mantra, centering word, or fragment of poem, a beautifully evocative image.

So here is a pair of each- a humble offering at the dark moon, in the heart of Winter, that you might attune to the deep Mysteries of Winter and Night, and receive a spark of the inspiration that lights a way in the dark.

“When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone, no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.”

From Sweet Darkness by David Whyte (House of Belonging)

See the full poem, Sweet Darkness, here.

And from The Winter of Listening:

No one but me by the fire, my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside.

All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,

what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

Even with the summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those who had nothing to say.

All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard.

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 led me to that otherness.

So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own.”

David Whyte, House of Belonging

Big Love and Inspired Visions,

Jamie

Image Credits and links: The ‘Isa’ Rune depicted as the Winter Queen, in Brian Froud’s Runes of Elfland.