“My friends, do not lose heart…For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement…To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these—to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity…Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.”
~Clarissa Pinkola Estes in “We Were Made For These Times”
In one way of reckoning, January marks the turning of the year. A time for looking back, looking ahead, and most importantly looking inward. The crushing inequities and violence of our times, the hostile rhetoric, the choking fear-mongering and intolerance, threaten to lead us once more down a path of despair. If you’ve ever been out for a walk just after a heavy snowfall blankets the earth and garments the trees, you know the hushed magic, the grace-filled pause that fills the space with light. It’s as if for that brief moment the snow beseeches us to see the world with fresh eyes. “Stop in your tracks, cease chattering and crashing about. Yes, there are bare and broken branches, gnawed bones, littered paths, starving birds and hunting hawks. But I have another world in view. If only you can be still and imagine it.” Now is the time to act, not out of fear or judgment or despair, but out of the stillness of the Spirit and wisdom of the Light. Because, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes says, “We were made for these times.”
“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coal-mouse asked a wild dove. “Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.
“In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coal-mouse said. “I sat on a branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a giant blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch—nothing more than nothing, as you say—the branch broke off.”
Having said that, the coal-mouse flew away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter; thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace to come about in the world.”
~ from NEW FABLES THUS SPOKE—“The Caribou” by Kurt Kauter