The Gift of Winter

By Eileen Dooling, RSM, Executive Director

Posted on 2/14/2018

One morning last week I watched a handsome and brawny hawk make its way across Neck Road onto the branch of a naked maple tree. The hawk stared deliberately and intensely at me as I drove to my ministry at Mercy by the Sea. I have noticed lately an increase in the number of hawks soaring along Neck Road making their way to a tree home. In reflecting on this, I noted that with the sparse foliage at this time of the year, more is visible to us, and the number of hawks may not have increased at all, just my ability to see them. I realized that in winter we see more clearly and more deeply into the woods and into the world around us. We tend to hunker down in winter, look inside ourselves, and wait longingly for spring. As we do so, what was not clear to us before becomes clear — or, at least, clearer. This, I think, is the gift of winter.

I thought about this as I tried to determine why I have felt neither the need nor the desire to write a blog lately. So much negative news on the national and world scene has assaulted us that I lack the inspiration to write anything of meaning. The only thing that seems clear to me is the mess we are in.

Or maybe that is just a facile excuse.

While I become overwhelmed and discouraged with the current news, I know there is little I can do to change it (though I will do what I can!). The only thing, the only person, I can truly change is myself, my heart and my attitude. And how humbling is that realization, how startling that awareness, how great is that need.

The winter is long with much to see and ponder. Hope is required. Carl Jung writes that “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens.”

In spite of my limitations. In spite of my biases and liberal leanings. In spite of uncertainty in the world, I will continue to look into my heart and anticipate an awakening within me. And I hold fast to the hope that spring will come again, that sanity and integrity, honesty and courage, respect and an acceptance of difference will prevail in our world, our country, our land, in our hearts — and in my heart.

May it be so.