More Questions Than Answers

When grief strikes a mother,
there is no end to it.
The earth parches, its
glittering wateres gone.
Everything is barren. Cattle starve
for lack of grain. Nothing grows.
Even the gods are destitute,
even the altar flames blow out.
Such is a mother's grief, bitter
and endless, for her lost child.

--Homeric hymn to Demeter

During the winter we feel the deprivation of sunlight and warmth. And during our soul's winters, too, we feel distant from happiness. Yet life cycles back to spring eventually, and our lives will cicyle back toward happiness as well.

I think I mentioned the other day that I've noticed that the days are already getting longer and then we go and have a cold snap - go figure.

But go figure indeed - it helps to remind us indeed that winter is here. To instill that sense of introspection that winter should kindle within us. Traditionally, winter was a time when clans and families drew together, warmed round the family hearth. Rarely venturing out because of cold and short days. Thoughts and feelings naturally turn inward. Reflecting on the past, and hoping for the future. THe tradition of bringing in an everygreen tree and decorating it with ribons and candles a symbol of the knowledge that light and life will return - spring will come again.

It makes me wonder for a 'chicken and egg' situation between the secular and the spiritual. our ancestors, though less sophisticated than us, (and believe me that's not necessarily a bad thing), were not stupid - surely they would have seen the correlation between the seasons and weather and all those things - so did they adopt the allegorical stories,the rituals and all of those kinds of things to reflect what they say in life on a spiritual level, or were they truly meant to comfort, dispell fear and explain?

But... why should such introspections be necessarily unhappy ones? That's the one thing I don't understand in this writer's approach to it all. Yes, I understand that many cultures used the myth of descent into the underworld to explain/symbolise the processes of winter, and that of necessity carries those kinds of overtones, but looking within oneself, if one is able to balance the disharmony with the harmony that an individual will typically find within, (Not everyone is going to 'like'everything they find inside of themselves after all), that looking within should carry happiness as well as sadness, each in balance. Sure I know people that have had a rotten year and are glad to see the back of it with the passing of this winter, but... somewhere within that rotten year there're going to be bright spots, surely?

Lots of questions and few answers there, I'm afraid, but such were my thoughts, and such often are my meditations, bringing up more questions to ponder on in times to come.

(From Goddess Companion: Daily Meditations on the Goddess.)