Today is the shortest, darkest day of the year. A 20 hour night here. Also, a turning point. We’ve spiraled all the way to the bottom, to the center I should say, and now we begin traveling the other way, out towards light.
I don’t think it’s strange that solstice comes to me in the image of a spiral, winter being the tight space deep within. A season for going in.
The darkness doesn’t bother me as much this year. It must be due to Rio. There’s something about these first months with a new baby that remove me from the hustle and bustle of society. I’ve been in a quiet, sleepy darkness for a while now. Not soul crushing darkness, but soul growing darkness. Like the womb. Or fertile soil. Even the cosmic space. Darkness that nourishes.
Our rhythm is slow. Our days aren’t measured by the hours we’ve put in, the boxes we’ve checked off, or any external output at all. There are no alarm clocks or bedtimes, no set meal times even. We sleep when we’re tired, we eat when we’re hungry. We deal in bodily functions and fluids.
When Alfredo panics about being late to his 9:00, I look at him like he lives on a different planet (He probably thinks the same as he takes in the sight of me at 9). He lives amongst flashing screens and bright florescent rooms while I hang here in our little cave bonding, building up reserves, preparing. I don’t even know what it is I’m preparing for. I can feel something though, churning somewhere in the deep darkness.
Rio is my third baby, so I know what a gift this time is. How quickly it passes. I can take it very easy in ways I just couldn’t with my first. I can approach it similarly to how one might approach winter – as a season.
Already, the darkest day is almost behind us. Tomorrow we begin moving towards light again, yet slowly, slowly. I won’t notice the light returning until around March. It can’t be hurried either. Even if spring comes early, the earth takes the time it takes to revolve. Just as a new life takes the time it takes to form in the womb. As seeds take their time setting roots in the dark soil.
This season – quiet, monotonous and practically colorless – is a sacred time of becoming too.
Wintering is a process we’ve long abandoned in our society where the cycles of production and capital flow do not, cannot, honor the inherent cycles of nature we’re still tied to.
It’s kinda weird we’re taught that the earth is governed by the sun and moon, which establish the seasons and tides. And that everything in nature is regulated by these factors – except for us. They’re just the seasons, not our seasons, right? Because we’re different, we’re set apart.
Actually, we’re affected by the seasons and tides whether we’re aware of it or not! And winter is no accident. It’s not some mistake on the part of nature. It’s a vital part of the process, year after year, life after life.
But winter is tough. How many of us find it easy to sit with the discomforts of a season that asks us to be more reflective than productive? To disconnect from external stimuli in order to connect with ourselves and our families in deeper ways? To dream instead of do? To build up our inner reserves now so we can build the thing out in the world later?
Our society discourages all of the above, right? Our technologies – and our growing dependence on them – are proof enough.
We also rarely acknowledge people in winter-like stages, such as postpartum, illness, grief, burnout, etc. They are walking reminders of everything we’ve forgotten and therefore cannot bear to face. And what about people in winter stages of life?
Just as there are seasons of the year, we also have seasons of our life.
For women, there is the spring Maiden (time to bud and grow). The summer Mother (time to birth and bloom). The autumn Maga or Queen (time to harvest and shed). And the winter Crone (time to die and prepare for rebirth).
And yes, these are archetypes. If you’re anything like me, you’ll reject them immediately. I don’t have to follow that old archetype, I tell myself. I’m a modern woman. Which is proof of how far I’ll go to protect the story I believe about myself. The story that formed when I was soberly told to put on a pad at age 13. Put on the pad and get back to school. The story that formed when I was 15 and a guy forced me against the wall. Take off your shirt and be quiet. When I was broken open from childbirth, leaking everywhere and lost. Bounce back and get on with it all. The story I sense coming as I spiral toward mid-40’s, because I’ve heard it said about those only a decade older than I. Just retire and get out of the way.
There are hundreds of stories like these that I’ve inherited. That I’ve believed. Even protected because, without them, who am I?
That’s when archetypes are helpful, because they aren’t stories I need to learn. They are stories I need to remember.
The old stories teach us that women are powerful and purposeful in each stage.
In fact, women EXPAND in power and responsibility as they age.
Today’s society grossly overvalues the young, budding Maiden. She doesn’t have many rights – this is patriarchy after all, and women are only as valuable as they are useful. But once she becomes a Mother, she is valued less and less due to the amount of time and energy required for raising children. A mother is rarely supported or utilized, which is a shame considering that “mothers know things deep within that are only revealed in this sacred season of life.” (source) Then, when her children are grown and she finally has some freedom back, she is made to feel behind, not relevant anymore. By the time she enters her winter season – becomes the Crone – she has almost no rights at all.
The Crone got its name because it was once considered the Crowning stage of life. Crones were revered and played a vital role in preserving rituals and guiding society. Now they are basically barred from society. We shut older women away in facilities and rarely visit or talk to them. As if we can’t even confront them.
Likewise, we shut ourselves off from winter, year after year, and all that winter asks of us. We flee to cities, to screens, to other lands. Anything to keep ourselves from confronting it.
But here’s the thing…
How we embrace and care for ourselves in one season determines how we emerge and experience ourselves in the next.
With my first baby, I did not allow myself to rest during postpartum. I continued working. Even launched a new business on my own. I was always out with the baby, meeting friends, making friends, at museums or parks, whatever. Just anything except slowing down. I had no idea what it meant to rest and recover, even in the midst of sleep deprivation and a birth injury that left me in constant pain.
By his first birthday, I was a wreck. My nervous system was so shot that my hands shook all the time. I came out of my postpartum bubble in a state of burnout. And it took me another year to realize why. I had not taken care of myself during those tender postpartum days. There was no one else to care for me either. No one to tell me, this isn’t normal. Quite the opposite, in fact. I had friends who were already back at work a few weeks after childbirth. If anything, I felt behind.
It was slightly better after my second childbirth, but it was also at the height of the Covid pandemic, so yeah…
This third time has been different. I’ve made sure of it.
Because if I want to feel strong and whole again by the time Rio turns one, then I need to spend these months recovering, bonding, and preparing. If I want to keep expanding in my purpose and power, then I need to slow down and actually listen to what my body is telling me. My body is the compass. My body is made from the same stuff as earth. And every living thing on earth understands rest as a necessary stage of becoming.
If we want to burst into spring like new butterflies, then we need to spend time in the cocoon.
Winter is regenerative.
It’s the break the soil needs in order to stay rich in minerals.
It’s the rebirth of foilage as it falls from trees, decays, and transforms into something new.
It’s the hormonal fluctuations in our bodies that metabolize food, information, and noise at lower rates during the cold, dark months of winter.
Winter is the time of reflection we need in order to respond to life consciously, rather than reacting to it unconsciously.
The winter Crone is the aggregated knowledge of a life that has seen many winters come and go, many ideas and systems come and go. She is potent in wisdom and has nothing left to prove or gain. She sees and advises with absolute clarity.
The Grandmothers of times past were the ones who held the final say on matters such as war. If this were still the case, the world might be a different place today.
— Jane Hardwicke Collings, “The Four-Phase Feminine Way”
I like to think we are born in the center and begin traveling outward on the spiral, through childhood, and then adolescence. Once we give birth and become a Mother, we are in full bloom. Then gradually we begin to wind back inward. We have less energy. We might sense time running out too. Yet we’re wiser now. We know who we are and what we want. We know how to quickly bring ourselves home. Gradually we travel back to the center of life. Call it death, call it rebirth, they arise from the same source.
In my last post, I talked about how children are born naturally striving toward wholeness. Maybe, just maybe, if we’re doing it right, we return to this state of wholeness at the end, close to the source of life. Ready to begin again.
It’s a remembering.
Speaking of, I just remembered something that Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her book, Braiding Sweetgrass. It even evokes the image of a spiral! But she describes the journey differently.
We begin our lives walking the Way of the Daughter. This is the time for learning, for gathering experiences in the shelter of our parents.
We move next to self-reliance, when the necessary task of the age is to learn who you are in the world. The path brings us next to the Way of the Mother. This is a time when “her spiritual knowledge and values are all called into service of her children.”
Life unfolds in a growing spiral, as children begin their own paths. And mothers, rich with knowledge and experience, have a new task set before them. Our strengths turn now to a circle wider than our own children, to the well-being of the community. The net stretches larger and larger. The circle bends round again and grandmothers walk the Way of the Teacher, becoming models for younger women to follow.
And in the fullness of age our work is not yet done. The spiral widens farther and farther, so that the sphere of a wise woman is beyond herself, beyond her family, beyond the human community, embracing the planet, mothering the Earth.
Daughter. Mother. Teacher. Wise woman.
Maiden. Mother. Maga. Crone.
From every corner of the globe, indigenous cultures remind us what it means to be in sync with the natural rhythms we’re apart of. Have always been apart of. Always will be.
As women, we also go through mini birth-death cycles every single month. We are the creative life force in bodily form. Our annual seasons are governed by the Sun, and our monthly cycles by the Moon. But this is a whole other topic that I’ve delved into here3.
For now, much love and happy Spring! I wish you a gentle yet powerful emerging.
Personally, I am feeling so excited to dust off my baskets and go out into the world again.
