Beauty, music, bellydance, the Dark Goddess, Nature, magick, ritual-theatre, death and love.

compendium of Aepril's communications on art, beauty, bellydance, the dark, faery tale, nature, magick, ritual, theatre, death and love. The talk of a priestess and shaman of the Dark Goddess.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Winter's Gifts

I am not complaining about Winter. I love it.

I know that most assume that I am an extrovert, but no, I am not. I am a performer. This is different. I am an "introverted exhibitionist".

Winter gives me a wonderful opportunity to go within even further, without the demands of too much "people time". Don't get me wrong--I'm not generally a misanthrope. I do care for other people. I just need lots of time to be alone with myself, and with Spirit. I like to have time and space to fully indulge myself in the subjects that interest me. I like to spend time with the other creatures of the earth, hearing their stories and songs. I enjoy long conversations with dear friends about "matters of ultimate concern".

I remember once I was told by someone who produced bellydance products and events that I was "rotting up there." Meaning, that because I wasn't in NYC trying to make it big, that I was wasting my life. When I spoke of my love for the Forest, and the Sea, she looked at me as though I was speaking in gibberish and drooling.

Some of my friends know that I once spent a year in cabin in northern Vermont. It was just me, and Coda, my wolf hybrid. The winter was the most beautiful, most awful and magnificent and important time for me. Day rolled into night and into the next day...Spirit spoke to me strongly then, and clear language and with Love. I made snow sculptures that would then melt away, a meditation on mortality. I began to dance then, and played music for the first time, but as though I'd been playing it all my life. My heart opened. 

I should say also that it is not an EASY time. Winter is not meant for that. Winter is the mortality bringer, the Snow Queen's season. It is a profound time though, one of getting down to gut and bone and heart and ART.

This Winter is like this; my piano is getting the work out of a lifetime, my pen is working and keyboard is well used, my body is worked out from dancing. I hear Spirit in a strong and clear voice. I am singing and playing and divining and creating. The natural world has an endless array of details to experience and behold, telling me about the Universe itself.

"THERE is a solitude of space,
A solitude of sea,
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be,
Compared with that profounder site,
That polar privacy,
A Soul admitted to Itself:
Finite Infinity."
Emily Dickinson

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