Winter Festival

Winter as a Yogic Embodiment

by Rocco Lo Bosco

Snow covered trees.
Snow covered streets.
Snow on grass and roofs.
Reflecting the reflections.
– Gurani Anjali

We incarnate winter as cold and snow and chilling wind, frozen ground, stars flickering in the icy night and bare skeletal trees shining beneath a sun that now seems distant. We incarnate winter as the seeing of warmth, the glance out the window at the deserted streets and the bitter moon, the silent and long nights when we hear the howl of the wind and the rush of decaying leaves scuttling across the frozen ground. We incarnate winter historically as the season which brings with it the necessity of provisions and preparation, a season hostile to physical comfort and ease, a season demanding forethought and alertness.

Winter is the name given the world when it becomes barren and cold, and yet it is felt also as an inward contraction; flesh shrinks from its harshness. As the outside becomes cold and fallow, silent and still, as the bare trees permit greater visibility making the sky appear hard and endless, as the brown skin of the earth is revealed, and objects become cold to the touch, we realize these conditions as our embodiment, as what is held and felt and lived within us. We wear extra layers of clothing, put on hats and gloves, stealing ourselves against the frigid solitude, have our cars serviced so as not to become stranded on an empty road during the sub-freezing night. It is we who feel the cold, who seek shelter, who look at the orange fire of the setting sun, who notice the quality of winter light, who consider the falling snow. It is we who await the spring, we who mark off the day “the winter season’s” beginning and end. Thus, Yogically, we realize the winter as our circumstance, a condition of being that is a kinesthetic, embodied manifestation, whose sacred meaning is revealed by our recognition that it arises through and is humanized by our experience. Winter is always “my” winter. My becoming is one with its unfoldment. How could it be otherwise?

We note too that winter’s movement is part of a living cyclical process that is the very movement of our existence: the repetition of birth, growth, decay, and death. A reoccurring cycle does not suggest the “same thing” is happening again and again, but rather that a remembered pattern is emerging which marks our existence in the movement of life. This pattern carries hidden within it latent patterns which were and will be again; spring, summer and autumn are contained in winder as seed is in frozen soil. From the horn of winter will pour forth the glory of spring, the fecundity of summer and the waning of autumn; each moment of the seasonal pattern is pregnant with the entire seasonal cycle; each cycle reflects the beginningless cycle of existence. All of what was and will be is held in the sacred now, the fount of all becoming. Time and self, cause and effect, form, sound and color, all meaning and possibility reside in the partless unity if the undivided moment opened through the silent mind, the mind returning to its root, the winter mind.

Winter is manifesting the suspension of activity and in this very suspension is contained the possibility of renewal and rebirth, the silent promise of spring. Winter is the season of production arrested and silence revealed. The trees coated with prisms of ice move in the wind and a thousand lights dance in the branches, each one beckoning, each one a plethora of beauty, a call to ecstasy, the heralding of perfection.The solitary crow sits on a wire and reminds us of the seat we are to take, the seat seated in the depths of our heart. Blowing snow whipped up into ghost like vortexes across the cracking streets calls us to release ourselves from the whirls of thought that conceal life’s unspeakable wonder, abundance and majesty. Winter is life’s sacred meditation, the return to stillness that marks revelation and allows becoming’s sacred renewal. yes, barren winter is still abundant, pouring out from the unseen, too much, too much, pouring back into the unseen, too much, too much; reminding us, calling us, indicating to us the vast, boundless silent dynamic at the heart of becoming, the uprisen origin now and always now, the origin that we are, the origin of all that surrounds us and penetrates us and pours from us. We are, each of us, selfless guardians and inheritors of a universe; we are each of us a universe, a sacred horn of plenty.

In the depths of meditational silence, beyond even the barest geometry of form, before even the first great note sounds, meditation meditates upon itself, and here lies the revelation of that unspeakable vibrant one who sources life’s dynamic, the unuttered and unutterable word, at the absent presence, the open secret of unchanging consciousness, “the knower in the field of all fields” who is the heart, the life and the distinct light of the treasured cycles of human existence: breath and birth, experience, joy and suffering, life and death, cycles within cycles that comprise the world and our presence in it. Beyond the difference of the light of summer and the light of winter, his unchanging light makes known all being, all change, all patterns and cycles. Through him all that moves while he stands unmoving everywhere. He is the eternal perfection of unchanging consciousness, witness and enjoyer of the ever changing glories of manifestation. Therefore let us praise the winter as we praise all what shows itself in existence and thereby indicates his unborn, all pervasive and eternal presence.