winter’s internal journey

And The Power Of Our Own Hands

by Jenny Wonderling

An important internal journey is reflected all around us in nature each winter. Here in the Hudson Valley and Northeast, the trees may seem nearly lifeless, the landscape sullen, but within all that, quiet and important movements are indeed happening. Those majestic branched beings have dropped their green canopy, blooms and fruit have long withered, yet as they stand naked in their seemingly ancient skin, they have merely stripped down to the essential. What if, as the journey turns inward, they are embracing the gifts of stillness and internal creativity that will help bolt the spring into wild cacophony and color?

In fact, the bursting birth of spring simply cannot happen without this essential, individual gestation in these darker days. Much of the wisdom winter offers is about returning to silence and one’s solitary experience, and too, the deepest, truest part of ourselves so that we can be born (to create and experience life) anew if we use our time right. The potential for this human rebirth has to do similarly with celebrating the opportunity for internal alignment and balance, and maybe even finding comfort in stillness.

Francis Weller, in The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains, “Silence is a practice of emptying, of letting go. It is a process of hollowing ourselves out so we can open to what is emerging. Our work is to make ourselves receptive. The organ of receiving is the human heart, and it is here that we feel the deep ache of loss, the bittersweet reminders of all that we loved, the piercing artifacts of betrayal, and the sheer truth of impermanence. Love and loss, as we know so well, forever entwined.”

To understand and invite these cold and often lonely months is to appreciate that, like children as they sleep, we too grow most in and through the dark. Embracing this notion is antithetical to our “just be happy” mythologizing of reality. And it is hard, maybe even excruciating for Americans to be still, to be quiet. We seem to be defined by our activities and productivity, and we are comfortable measuring ourselves and others by those values. Are we enough? Have we done enough? We look for evidence of our impact through monetary reward, through our “social” worth, and perhaps most of all through our “busyness” which usually has more to do with frenzied action than a return to ourselves. But what happens when much of this, like autumn’s leaves, has fallen away?

People speak of seasonal depression, but how much of that is being forced to sit with ourselves without distraction or perpetual motion, to explore and mend our own unresolved grief and longings ?

Winter offers us an opportunity to plunge into all that, to release or transform it, and what no longer serves us. Winter gifts us time to dream and re-member. Who are we really, whatever season? Can we become content doing less? Can we find the “value” in stillness?

Stillness is Never Still. There’s always plenty happening, even when we’re mostly in our homes. But we humans can be harsh judges. We ask, am I enough? Am I doing enough? In this culture it can sometimes feel like we’re not. That’s where the power of craft and creativity come in—to bust through and transform a sense of overwhelm, disconnection, and lack of meaning.

PLAY, big important words that will bring you into full presence. They will help you forget those worries and what-ifs, and restore your faith in this beautiful moment. And this one…while you breathe a little deeper, and time will seem to stretch like the clay in your curious hands.

One of Circle Creative Collective’s goals is to help one another find a way back to what matters most. As we step into the colder months ahead and enter deeper into home hibernation mode, Circle will offer the community a series of workshops that will explore a plethora of craft skills. These will serve to (re)connect individuals to an open hearted community, and to the inherent wisdom that lives within each of our own hands.

It makes us realize that our very existence matters, our hands as portals to our soul’s longings. Those who honor a creative process and spend time in and with nature simply manage better. Creativity, craft, and connecting to our natural world, like self-care, must be recognized not as indulgences but essential tools to feeling grounded, to being able to cope in what often feels like a lot of uncertainty, isolation, and even fear. These tools help us to be able to know ourselves better and feel more content.

You are invited to join us on the creative path because creativity and craft are superpowers.

We hope you will experience this for yourself. When you can’t walk in the woods or grow things in a garden due to weather or other reasons (and also when you can), try keeping a basket of yarn, paints, a journal, a loom, and whatever else piques your interest on hand, even if you’ve never tried these things before or deemed them important. Then, when you’re having a moment of feeling lost, bored, or alone, try taking out some of those materials as quickly as you can. Without judgement or qualifying what you are doing, explore as you once did as a child.

Soon, simple things like color, wool, string, or blank paper, will remind you again to just BE, to

Our Circle was formed because our founders recognized the healing power and wisdom of traditional craft and creativity. We remind each other of the importance of creating with a reverence for the earth, and an awareness about our collective impact on communities and individuals near and far. We encourage upcycling. We ignite a passion for processes; about the connection such traditions hold to the past. We invite open hearted play, conversation, and exploration. We laugh our heads off, and we sometimes weep as we share space, stories, listen to one another and create.

To quote Meggan Watterson, “When I sit in a circle, I know my body will communicate more than anything I end up saying. It says, wordlessly, just by being at eye level with everyone else: There is no hierarchy to the spiritual world. There’s just this circle where the first becomes the last, and the last becomes the first. We are all equal. And we’re all equally trying, in our own crazy ways, to love ourselves enough to see the good that’s right here with us.”

As in every sacred circle, we invite you to come with your unique and positive intentions.

SoulCollageTM for Groups

Griefis much more than being really sad, or hugely disappointed. You’ll know it when longing and lamentation takes hold of your being and puts the rest of the Universe on pause— for some time.

There are many layers to deep grieving, and so many ways we can experience loss when love dies, or simply disappears.

The burden of loss is heavier and more intense when a relationship is burdened by knotted emotions such as guilt, shame, blame and anger. In my greatest grief, it took me a while, being in a dark, thick, heavy and immobile state, to crack the hard boundary of disbelief that a loss had happened. I became unable to lift myself up off the floor some days, or to get out of bed, or do anything outside. Many of you know this kind of experience. I had to lie in it for some months.

When it became too exhausting to be exhausted, I was ready to move the immobile. How I did it, and what I recommend here, is to build spiritual practices when