27/02/2022
"You must become the loving mother who calls all her lost children, or the estranged parts of yourself, home."
- The Way of the Happy Woman: Living the Best Year of Your Life by Sara Avant Stover
While, in winter, nature’s saying one thing, society’s saying another. We need to acknowledge that there is a reason why winter’s wisdom is ignored in modern society.
We’ve come to see rest as lazy and unproductive and have fallen in love with constant, linear progress.
Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays are designated off days (and these are even being ignored now, too), and at all other times we’re expected to be on.
Within the cycle of life, late adulthood isn’t valued either. Our elders are hidden away in old-age homes, no longer able to enrich the youth with their wisdom.
There’s a sad ignorance in this, a forgetting of how to honor the sacred balance by holding in equal esteem all of life ’s stages.
You, I know, are here because you’ve seen the fallacy in this denial of the dark, quiet point in the circle.
You’ve seen how destructive it is for your health and happiness as a woman — as well as for your family and community.
But we haven’t just thumbed our noses at winter repose because of our prejudices about becoming soft and rested; we have also done this because we’re afraid to face our own shadow sides.
We’re afraid of uncertainty. We don’t want to look our sadness, our anger, or our fear in the eye and really ask what each has to teach us.
When we avoid facing these less savory parts of ourselves, we’re missing out on the opportunity to become who we truly are.
Yes, it’s messy.
Yes, it feels uncomfortable.
But by going to those depths you call in the light. You heal the parts of yourself that you have never wanted to acknowledge, much less learn to love.
You must become the loving mother who calls all her lost children, or the estranged parts of yourself, home.
-excerpt from "The Way of the Happy Woman: Living the Best Year of Your Life" by Sara Avant Stover