TEVET MORE THAN HUMAN WORLD 2
I started the idea of doing two of these a month in Tishrei, early fall, because things were changing rapidly enough that I felt doing it once a month couldn’t capture the pace at which the seasons were turning. Once a month wasn’t dancing with the world.
Then comes the slowness of winter, and once a month seems plenty. We’re in the middle of Tevet, and the world doesn’t feel much different than the beginning of Tevet. It’s been warm outside, our last frost was probably a week ago. By early winter, I should feel the crunch of a lightly frozen earth under my feet. Instead I see the streaks of the bare earth where the dog has skidded to a stop while chasing deer and has managed to dig up the grass.
I harvested the last of the bok choi and chard last week, but I still have kale and carrots in the garden. It’s a miracle to me that I can still go out into the garden and pick part of my dinner. There’s a difference between winter in some snow covered and colder and maybe more elevated part of the world and winter here in the mid Atlantic in the broad river valleys. It is calm and still in both places when the wind doesn’t blow and it remains a time of vision and stories. And yet there is the green of the kale, of the carrot tops and even some grass. If I were raising cows and had stockpiled enough fescue, my cows would still be eating pasture, not hay. Yet the carrot tops are slowly turning yellow, the grass isn’t growing. Winter is settling in and I am slowing down, slowing down. I put on a scarf for the first time this year the other day and recited Shehachiyanu, the prayer we recite when we have made it to an old/new thing such as lighting the Hanukkah candles again, or putting on a scarf or when I go to plant something in the garden come spring. I am grateful to be here, to be able to sit on my bench in my little woods, to listen to the squirrels running up and down the trees, to feel the slowness of the world in my body.
Winter is traditionally viewed as a time of visions. I think this is both because we have more time for visions and because we can see further this time of the year. Some of you might say that you can always see far if you climb to the top of the mountain. You can always see far in the desert and maybe even in the prairie grasslands (I’m not sure). But most of us live where it is most fertile and in our ecosystem that means valleys and trees. We simply can’t see as far during the spring, summer and fall, as we can during the winter. It is a time to reflect on what our visions are for ourselves and for the world.
Of course, we in the modern world need to be more deliberate about this slowing down because we aren’t forced by the darkness (artificial light), or the cold (indoor heat) and too many of us don’t even notice that you can see a lot further without the leaves on the deciduous trees.
Here are some questions to guide you in a visioning process.
QUESTIONS
What do you care most deeply about?
What are your gifts? Gifts are things that you are both really good at and that come very easily to you.
Who is your community or who do you want it to be?
What visions do you want to implement in this turn of the earth?
