Winter to Spring (a meditation)

The energy around our house is strange this month. Both my husband and I are busy, busy with our projects. He’s building a Playstation 2 mod and I’m crafting like mad, working on this blog, and immersing myself in a number of on-line networking endeavors…in addition to school and raising children. I’m happy and proud of my work, but beneath this feeling of well being is a layer of tension that explodes into directionless anger or drops into despair when things go wrong.

I feel the specter of self doubt warning me to beware beginning so many projects at once. He argues that I’m notorious for abandoning my work, not to be trusted. Yet I feel that’s changing. Maybe I say that because of the moon or the momentary prosperity granted by a sizable tax refund. Maybe it’s true.

I look back at the woman of last winter. She and her husband were at war over feelings neither fully understood. She took off her wedding ring and vowed to make a new life for herself, only to discover herself pregnant with a second child. She cried a lot that winter and sketched sad-eyed woman with round bellies, gazing thoughtfully into space. She constructed a belief system that allowed her to place all the blame for sadness and wrongdoings on someone else. “Reality is made of a multitude of perspectives,” she told herself, “Some people have more passionate perspectives than others. These domineering, strong willed people overpower the stories of passive people like me. Passive people are bullied into living lives that fulfill the stories of others instead of their own.”

So she lived a story that she told herself belonged to someone else, only to realize a year later that she is the one who wrote the tale of mix-matches realities. Winter melted into spring and she found herself a tiny place among the stone circles up top Cumberland Church Hill where the old witches live. She asked the Hill how a woman might best live. She asked the Hill how to balance Motherhood with Self, Wife with Woman, and the Hill answered her with wind moving among the dappled sycamore branches.

I don’t fully understand how the thoughts of last winter and my thoughts on today connect, other than an observation of February. February is Brigit’s month and tells the story of secret spring.

I’ll tell you a story Brigit told me...tomorrow.