Tossing Snowballs into the River - Winter Solstice Ritual

I walk through snowy woods to a bend in the river, hidden from view by the trees and a small slope. The short day's light is beginning to fade, but a nearly full moon hangs above the naked trees upriver. I've followed a deer path and now stand at river's edge in two feet of snow. I have found a sacred place to savor and celebrate winter's solstice.

Breathing, listening to the joyful sound of shallow water rushing over riverstone. I hear my heart beating and soften into a quiet stance. Who am I?, I ask the river. Who do you want me to be? The sound of my beating heart is a solid rhythm for the river's bright melody of gentle waves and currents. The wonder held in this space suddenly shocks time into hibernation and I stand dissolved and free of name and contraction.

Moonlight pours from my face and the low hanging branches and round river stone. Our bones reach deep into the snowy bank, absent of leaf and bird. The river whispers our true name, speaking her fluid language of source intelligence, a universe of bubbling life. This, this again, she sings, now and now, this unending flow. We float upon gravity's grace in an effortless flow of being, tumbling as beauty's truth, rising as creative essence serving love's expansive reach.

My cold toes bring me back to the riverbank, Thomas shivering in the near darkness. I make snowballs and toss my dissolving fears into the rapids. Obstacles of arrogance and laziness and judgments and worries and clutchings are tossed one by one into the river until the sharp pain of my frozen fingers says Enough! I stand silent in the polar essence of the solstice and devote my fullest energy and awareness to being an embodied action of presence expressing the unity of planet, sun, life, motion and soul to all resonant beings sharing this evolving field of emergent life.

december 21, 2007
5:55 pm

Thomas Arthur
awakeningspace.net


Ripples photo by brentdanley
Moonrise photo by James Jordan