Whether cloudy or clear, wintertime can deepen meditation and heal the heart.
Clouds cover the skies like sheep’s wool, muffling the sounds of the birds and the passing cars. The overcast sends a shadow over my heart, evoking a little sadness and melancholy.
Yet it also dampens the noise in my mind, much like it softens the shuffle of people walking by on street. It’s a quiet that is expectant, like the silent and heavy rain clouds hanging overhead, not yet ready to drop their water pellets on the ground.
Quiet Cloudiness
This is so different than the quiet on a clear, starry night. That kind of quiet is spacious, vast, crystal-like in its intensity. That silence is almost deafening in its great expanse. It makes me throw my arms up and reach out to the universe, even though I don’t move.
This quiet cloudiness, however, is gentle, subtle, and soft, like a blanket thrown over my shoulders, wanting to wrap me up in its compassion.
Compassionate Clouds
It takes me inward, this muffled silence of the winter clouds, and makes me want to cry, just like the clouds want to let go of their rain. These clouds bring out what is hanging heavy in my heart, even if I don’t really know what it is. I can feel it, nevertheless, and long for the rivulets to flow down my cheeks, to unburden the old grief that I’ve allowed to hang out somewhere inside myself.
This is a healing, inward kind of quiet. A compassionate Cloudiness.
Clarity Revealed
The next morning, I wake and descend the dark stairs to my altar. Sitting on my cushion, out the eastern window I see the light blue already. Clear skies. The sun doesn’t take long to dust the horizon with a subtle pink, and the winter sun rises from his nap behind days of the wool cloud-blanket.
Clarity streams into my head and heart. It is a light day, and hope arises over the hills. My heart lifts with the sun.
Renewal
Even in the midst of winter, the signs of renewal are everywhere, including the sun itself. No matter the dark night or day, life comes again. After our hearts empty out in the melancholy of the darkness, they rise up from the soil and send out new shoots into life.
My heart now has more room. The tears I shed watered the flowers that will arise from those bulbs in the ground.
Let Winter Heal You and Deepen You
Make the room in your heart for meditation in the winter. Meditation isn’t always sitting and watching your breath, or chanting a mantra. Sometimes, it is a time to sit with what lies in the heart space and to feel it: without judgment, attachment, or disdain.
Winter offers the opportunity to have quiet time with yourself. If you allow whatever lies within to release from its confines, new growth can burst through, like the first shoot breaking through the casing of the seed. Let the tears, the joy, the worry, the past –whatever — flow through and out, making space for the greater potential that wants to germinate and expand within you.
Winter does its healing on all of us. Trust the process. Let the clouds hang where they are, and know that the sun does come out. When the sky clears, you’ll see it like you haven’t seen it for months.
