In times of transition, Nature gets messy.
It's been a really long winter. Maybe it's because I indulged in an urge to start listening to Christmas music too soon last year -- which I confess, I did. I'm a sucker for my Holiday Bing Crosby. Maybe it's because we went to get our Christmas Tree even before Thanksgiving (in my defense, if you don't do it around here, you get to pick from the squatties and the barelings).
Anyway, it's been a long, long winter, and for one of the first times in my life, I find myself wishing it would just be gone. Go away. I'm sick of the cold, sick of the apparent deadness, sick of being cooped up inside. Most of all, I'm sick of the cloudy days with no sunshine. Oh, and I'm sick of having to shovel snow just to make my driveway presentable enough for the neighbors.
But, things are changing.
You know the first warm day you have after a long winter? I do. We had ours about a week ago and seriously, I felt like the air was electric. It just felt so damn...hopeful. It felt like I hadn't even known it, but I had been slowly suffocating, and finally I was taking a deep breath of fresh, living air.
Ahhh, the hope of it. When things are in that zone of "good-for-the-most-part" I end up overlooking hope as one of those virtues that is only for the desperate. Most of the time, I'd rather be chasing Love than Hope.
But it's at the end of a long, cold, dreary Winter that I realize the distinction between these two virtues, and just how much Hope can do for you.
Hope is what makes the Earth wake up.
But around this point in the Earth's yearly cycle, things start to get messy. Snow starts to melt. At least where I'm from, when the snow melts, all the dirt inside the snow condenses into this scummy film clinging to the last bits of ice along the sides of the road. Things get muddy, mucky, squishy. Cars get filthy immediately, and stay that way until all the melting is done.
Nature hasn't yet zipped up her green dress, though she is removing her white veil.
You could compare this process to what happens when we fast to lose weight. Fat cells start to melt away, but the toxic chemicals which the body had sequestered inside of these fat cells have not yet been washed away by cleansing rains of healthy blood.
You could also compare this process to what happens when life just sucks, and then slowly starts to get better again. Often, we get a glimmer of hope, but then we get snowed on a couple more times before the "Winter" relents and all the "snow" is able to truly melt away. As circumstances get a little warmer, we might find a puddle of sludge right outside our door.
The important thing to remember is that this mess we start to see in periods of natural transition, is actually a harbinger of sunnier days ahead. And new growth follows the Sun. Remember, Nature is always in the process of making room for and nourishing new growth, better growth -- higher manifestation.
Snow melt becomes the Mother's Milk for every new seed.
If you're coming out of a period of "Winter" in any aspect of your life, don't be too shaken by any last minute "snow days." Don't be discouraged by all the dirty scum that starts to coagulate in place of the beautiful white virgin veil. Messy is good. It signals change. In Nature, it usually signals fecundity, fertility.
Dirty mud, is fertile mud.
It's only a matter of time before the mess is washed away by rain. It's only a matter of time before the rain is dried up by Sun. It's only a matter of time before the Sun nourishes, then coaxes, then evokes, and then unfolds the buds of new growth. So go ahead, if it's that time in your year, stick your hands in the mud and have a little Hope in the process.