When winter knocks on the door and you are snowed in, you can’t leave the house, can’t escape yourself. All human movement in the white world ceases for a time as the wind roars, snow swirls and drifts pile up against all obstacles.
Here you are in the house, cozy and warm, yet there remain many long weeks until the spring thaw comes. You will endure the cold, the wind. You will survive this harsh and bleak time of year when life seems to have abandoned the world.
Winter strips bare the bones of Mother Earth, lays the reality of the frozen world before you – the tree wraiths with their black branches dancing in the gusting wind that cuts like a knife.
Winter trees
Many compare winter to death. But, dear ones, life waits deep in the roots of the sleeping trees and grasses, Deep in the soil below the frost zone, beneath the blinding drifts of snow. Life bides her time, resting and waiting for the warm mild days to return, the bright spring sun that draws all life upward to his life giving light.
Spring tree
When winter overtakes your being, find time to rest and go inward. Connect with the spark of existence that is deep within your being and know that life will return once again when the season turns.
Dear beloved, do you exist in the manner of frozen ice, living in a perpetual winter, or do you live and breathe and move like flowing water? Have you known both ways of being?
All who walk this earth find themselves in the season of life called winter from time to time, a winter in the mind, in the emotions, a frozen heart, perhaps a time of grief.
GCW in snow
If you are stuck in the cold, you will find a way to cycle through the season of winter in your life and move on to the time of thaw and warming. This feels like spring with new life unfolding everywhere, giving way to the bank full flow in streams and rivers and the green leaves of summer.
When you are living in the seasons of spring and summer within your heart, your life flows effortlessly downstream finding the path of least resistance, moving forward with grace, moving toward the ocean with ease.
In summer, your life is like a river, refreshing all who drink of it, sustaining life along its course. The river of your life moves through the landscape, flowing easily around obstacles, even cutting through layers of stone over the course of centuries, to reach the goal.
Sunlit ripples, shallow creek
Then once again you may experience the biting winds and chilly air of autumn and into the frozen time of winter. All forward movement, all flow ceases when winter arrives, life goes underground and water freezes. Everything is stuck in place, frozen in time and space. As you have been here before, you know it is a temporary state. Do not lose heart, dear ones.
With time, patience, self awareness and self love, you can thaw the frozen and stuck places in your heart. Reach out for help if you need it. Your life can once again flow like water in midsummer.
Where there is forward movement and flow, there is life.
As 2 legged beings, you have no physical roots to anchor you to the Earth as plants and trees have. You have the freedom and the free will to choose the path you walk upon this Earth. You have the ability to change course, to choose a new direction.
The ability to choose your course wisely in life increases as you connect with both Earth and Spirit. Some think the two realms are mutually exclusive. That belief will harm you and cause you to be less than you can be! You do not have to choose one or the other. You can live fully in your body while allowing your spirit to guide you.
This is what it means to be fully human.
Your challenge is to live in your body, immersed in your physical life, knowing the joys, pleasures, and sorrows of the body within its temporary life span, while at the same time, knowing the presence of your indestructible spirit that precedes and underlies your physical existence.
Tiny feather in winter
Your body connects you to the earth for your sustenance, your survival, your human experience which instructs your spirit. It anchors your spirit in time and space as roots anchor a tree.
Your spirit guides your physical being with love and increasing wisdom from lifetime to lifetime. It helps you remember lessons you’ve learned in the past and helps you know your gifts and use them wisely.
You can bridge both worlds and live both in the heady realm of spirit and the earthy realm of the body. You will get better at it the longer you live and the more you ask for integration. Living this way is an unfolding process of discovery.
Like a tree fully alive from root to crown, drawing in nourishment from the Earth and light from the heavens, you are creating one beautiful and fully integrated whole.
A new day lightens the sky in the east. This is life giving you another opportunity to start fresh. Life allows you the time to reevaluate and renew your life, to grow into the person your spirit calls you to become.
Nature’s rhythms show that you can begin again after setbacks and illness, after disappointments and sorrows. Spring follows winter without fail. The moon cycles through her phases each month. Storms roar through the valley pushing much old growth to the ground, leaving food and light for new life to reach to the sun.
A tree cut off at the ground will sent up suckers reaching for the light. Tender new grass appears after a prairie fire. Green shoots of crocus push through the melting snow in March. The world greens and leafs out finally after a hard winter softens into a joyful spring.
You too after the fires, storms or winters of life have passed may send forth green shoots, leaves, and blossoms and renew yourself. This may look and feel like new energy flowing through your veins, new ideas and creative projects, new vibrancy, a renewed sense of humor and playfulness…passion for life.
The sun will rise again and you will have another day to move toward becoming who you are at the level of your soul, to choose a new thought that supports you in place of the old stale thoughts, to choose a different pattern of being, to tune yourself to a more pleasant feeling, to take the first small step to realizing your dreams.
Of course, patience is your friend as these changes take time and attention and perseverance. Trust and give yourself the grace to accept yourself as you are while at the same time moving toward the new way of being that you desire.
Open your heart to this most amazing gift of a new day.
Dear friends, thank you for your patience while I paused my blog due to an illness in the family. My family member is doing well. We’re back now. Many blessings, Betty
Now, in the words of GCW:
If I could weep, I would not weep, for our Earth and her many inhabitants have survived upheaval, turmoil, danger, disease, war, plague, drought, famine, violence, death and destruction over the eons life on this planet has existed.
Beneath the fear, the terror, the hate and destruction seen in current events, beneath the profound deprivation visited upon so many families lies the spirit, untouched by death and destruction, enduring, gaining in wisdom from lifetime to lifetime. Unbreakable, unshakeable.
At the heart of your spirit lies peace.
GCW in Midwinter
At the heart of your spirit lies a loving and profound silence in which all things are possible.
At the heart of your spirit lies the unfolding of love, the love that carries us from lifetime to lifetime with joyful anticipation, that permeates the billions of living beings on Earth, that infuses the cells and DNA of all living things.
The very web of life is composed of the energy of this love. All spirits are joined as one in this magnificent web.
When times are difficult, when you feel fear, when all you’ve known is breaking apart, tune into your spirit for the wide angle view. Like a soaring bird, your spirit will help you rise up and see your life, your family, your community, the events of the day from 1000 feet up.
When you are able to gain this spirit perspective you can feel the temporariness of fearful and dangerous events, the immensity of peace and love surrounding and permeating this world, this universe.
Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.
Dear friends, I feel a great heaviness in this world right now.
I can feel the vibrations of your tension, the tightening of your shoulders and throat, the churning in your gut, the stress, the weight of worry many are feeling right now in this time of uncertainty.
For those who are worried, frightened – lean against me and those of my kind, the extended family of trees. Enter into our friendly energy, rest your weight on us, we will support and calm you, help you know what is real and solid and true.
Grandmother Cottonwood
Tune yourselves to our quiet and subtle frequency. Listen with your whole body and heart, your wise self.
We will help you know you are not alone, that life goes on, that you are safe in this moment.
Know this. All trees and the collective spirits of nature – animal and plant, insect, reptile, amphibian, all angelic beings, your human ancestors who have crossed to the light, all spirits or land air and sea, of heaven and Earth, of the Universe are with you always.
Male Cardinal in winter
Please call on us for advice, kindness, companionship, spiritual nourishment, comfort. You are not alone. You are surrounded by love.
Tune into our quiet and loving voices to steady and calm your anxious minds.
Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.
As trees, we must practice patience. We begin humbly, as a tiny fragile looking seed finding a home in the soil where conditions for life and future growth exist- moisture, light air soil, warmth… the sense of home and belonging.
Silver Maple seeds
Here our first roots unroll toward earths’ magnetic pull. Our precious seed leaves burst out and open, stretching to the light. This is our home for life, this patch of soil and sun.
We are settled here. We are content and patient in the place chance has chosen for us. We live lives of endurance, growing slowly year by year adding height and girth, our bark expanding and thickening.
Hackberry bark
We practice patience as our new green branches turn woody in months gaining in strength and size over the years. We stand tall according to our nature, we soak in light, pull in nutrients and moisture from the soil, feeding ourselves, providing homes for birds and insects, wildlife, tiny mammals, mosses, lichen. We do this for decade upon decade.
For generations, for lifetimes we thrive and survive.
You might consider us to be miracles! From fragile seedlings to magnificent mature trees, we have a strong will to live and endure, to take up the space we need, to soak in our share of sunshine and pull in the sustenance we need from the Earth.
We patiently endure droughts, torrential rains, lightening, storms, extreme cold and wilting heat. Year after year we patiently adapt to the conditions of our environment. Sometimes these conditions cause stress and then we benefit from your care concern and attention.
Trees and storm clouds
We are the calm green backdrop to your lives, providers of cooling shade, beautifying your neighborhoods and landscapes, holding the soil, clearing the air, sheltering your farms towns and and cities, greening your cemeteries, ranging over mountains and ringing lakes.
We lovingly watch your children grow from infants to adults, we witness with affection the growth and development of your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
I am swimming in this river of life. Sometimes smack in the middle of the fast moving current, surrendering to the flow. Not fighting it.
Sometimes the river of life runs low during dry periods and grounds me on a sandbar for a time, until the rains come and the water rises again.
And then, once again, I give myself to the river, trusting its course and flow as the current pulls me downstream.
The water of this river joins all waters of the earth, all creeks, rivers, streams lakes, inland seas, all melted glaciers, ice and snow. The current’s pull grows stronger.
The flow of all water on our planet culminates finally in the one great meeting place.
This is the ocean, where numberless droplets merge and become one universe of surging and living water, the stuff of life.
When you come back to your roots, you rediscover your true self. The soul of you, the deep center of you that knows your purpose here, that knows and accepts the truth of you you are.
You were born with this wisdom, you knew your spiritual roots as a child. Can you remember?
When you live from your true self, your roots nourish you and connect you to the Earth, your home and your spirit. The roots of your true self are roots of integrity, of self respect, of knowing who you are.
Only humans can choose to appear as something they’re not, to misunderstand and cut off their connection to spirit, to disconnect from their true selves.
Then you are like a tree without roots, vulnerable to storms, high winds, and stress, weaker than you might be, disconnected from your strength and source of nourishment.
Uprooted Cottonwood tree
Dear ones, if you have become disconnected from your wise self, you can renew yourself and regain wholeness. The damage is not permanent, you can regenerate your life and regain your power.
You are flexible and resilient. You are a survivor! Send you roots deep and reach to the light!
Dear reader, this post is from the archives of AskGCW.
Yes, I repeat myself once again with rooting and grounding theme. I do this because so many humans walk this earth with their awareness and their spirits partially outside of their bodies.
The energy of ungrounded humans feels as though it floats in space without an anchor or home. This causes many to feel anxious and unmoored. Ungrounded people are disconnected from a vital source of life-giving energy.
Making sure you are grounded in times of trial and uncertainty, when you feel spacey anxious or disconnected.
Here is one simple way to anchor yourself with my friends and cousins the trees. Which tree are you drawn to? Oak, sycamore, sweet gum, hackberry, cedar palmetto, beech, elm, walnut, fir, hickory, maple, ash, cherry, apple, spruce, poplar, aspen, magnolia, pine, cottonwood, mesquite, …?
Grandmother Cottonwood
Choose your favorite tree. If needed, find a picture of a magnificent tree to help your imagination see the details.
Now envision for a few moments that you too are a magnificent tree. Bear with me, you don’t have to tell anyone else about this…
Now imagine that you have roots reaching deeply into the soil, gripping the earth. Your roots range in size from mighty ones the size of main branches, tapering down to the tiny tenacious hair like roots that draw in nourishment directly from the soil.
Strong roots
With your imagination see and feel your roots reaching deeper into the soil and subsoil, through the bedrock and mantle of the Earth to the molten core. (Anything is possible in your imagination)
Now as you breathe in, pull in the anchoring Earth energy up into your feet, legs and lower torso to fill the cells of your physical being and help bring your awareness into your body – where you are meant to live.
Now you are plugged into the frequency of the planet.
Breathe the Earth energy in through your roots and let it travel upward through your trunk and branches through the tips into your leaves. Do this breathing several times as you imagine the energy filling your from the center of the Earth up.
Interwoven branches and nest
Feel yourself relax and become one with our planet. Allow the Earth energy to soak into every cell of your body.
Let the trees show you anchoring. This simple practice can help calm you. No equipment or expensive accessories are needed, no experience or skill required.
All you need to tap into Earth energy are your heart, imagination and intention.
Ask Grandmother Cottonwood 