Slogging and Lingering

Mid February is quite the vibe. January felt like a year and mid February feels like a slog. We still have our Christmas wreath on the front door if that tells you anything. Can't seem to find a rhythm or engage in anything that remotely looks like productivity or a routine other than going to work Monday-Friday. (And just a side note: I am perfectly fine with this and don't feel I need to try harder :)

I think winter is getting to me though. I don't mind the cold - I actually kind of love it, but the grey skies are making me feel a little crazy even with daylight slowly extending. I was in Aldi the other day and they had a row of potted plants with very bright red blooms on them. I stopped and stared at them for a while. It was like my brain receptors began coming alive just by looking at the color red.

What is so interesting to me though is in this grey winter slog, I'm tired and my heart feels despair from the so many troubling situations- but my mind lingers towards hope. Not a "save the day" kind of hope or a "fix it" kind of hope (although how nice would that be for our problems to be fixed), but a slow moving residual kind of hope that transcends our regular ordinary human condition and just hangs around with us in the messiness of it. 

I start to hear songs in my head that haven't been written, and I think of gardens I want to plant and seeds I want to start... if only I could find them in my messy house. I start to think of the stars that constantly shine bright but can only be seen by us when the world goes dark or a single candle that lights a room.  I think of kindness and gentleness and how I want to cultivate more of that in my life and how I lean into the world. I think of how even though so much is out of our control we can still cultivate beauty in our lives that will last lifetimes. 

I was reminded this weekend of a story about a man named Leonard Wolf who lived under the reign of Hitler in Nazi Germany. He was committed to planting iris' in his garden because they would last long after the "lunatic" was gone. I wrote about it a few years ago here and was grateful for the reminder to keep planting and cultivating goodness and beauty in the midst of slogging and despair.

So, I'm going to keep slogging through the winter (both figuratively and literally). I'm going to keep feeling despair, and I'm going to keep lingering towards hope. Anyone with me?