Winter

Death, rest, inner processes that have not shown themselves in consciousness. Inactivity with the falling away of outer activity to concentrate on inner consciousness. It can also depict a hard time in life or business, perhaps a period of cold, in the sense of nothing growing in your life, or little feelings. See: Cold; Ice.

Most of us have been raised to see the seasons as an external event. Even the Christians who continue the ancient rituals have the same feeling. Yet we know very well, if only unconsciously, that we are a product of nature, the Earth and its seasons. We are all influenced by the cycles of growth and death, and yet we usually fail to sense the seasons as an almighty influence within us.

Also, we are unconscious of being a part of nature in the sense of knowing as our own experience the enormous influence the seasons have on our inner life, and the power we could get from acknowledging them.

 Emotional coldness, a quiescence awaiting an appropriate period for growth or the end of a cycle of action and fruitfulness. Winter can also denote the absence of relationship or an unfruitful period of life, old age or death in some form. See: Death.

Winter is also a seeming death of so much, but under the surface enormous preparation is happening. The old past life, the past that you have been taken in as a tree might, where leaves and foliage – i.e. different experiences, has become fertiliser for the new year of your growth, the new life following from the past – the many pasts, for seeds are the survivors of the winter and in fact have carried the experience from the beginning of life. And that experience is held in readiness for another season and its experiences.

In nature there is no death, but simply an entrance into a different phase of life. So the seed dies by losing its present form to become roots and stem; the stem and leaves change to become flowers to experience fertilisation. Then, often the plant dies or changes its form to produce seeds. All a process of change, not death. Humans, likewise, when their body can no longer support consciousness, leaves it to become a new impulse. Someone recently told me, “But we are all atoms, and at death our body and its atoms fall apart.”

But they forgot that atoms didn’t form the body and its organs, another process organises the atoms into the wonder of the whole thing, our body, and at death the Organiser, Life, has left the body and it falls apart. The old phrase, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust” is about the body and its atoms, which no longer are held together by the organising process of Life, so it is not about the Life of which we are an example.