Solitude and a Meditation for Winter

This morning brought the first frost. The park was unrecognisable. An otherworldly scene. All washed with silver, save the outline of the deer and trees. Winter, the Earth’s contraction, was beginning.

I returned home to hot tea, and an online funeral. A screen that earlier was stuffed with emails touting Black Friday promotions now showed a crematorium. I would have sat in a back row, well behind the family. From the sofa, my view of their backs felt wrong, intrusive. The one-way screen made the service a spectacle.  

As the music played, these barriers dissolved. I was glad to cry in a way that would have been too much in public. I remembered mourning sounds in Morocco, half-cry half-song throughout the city. Maybe after this year we will be louder. More able to express what is usually kept within familiar walls. I hope it has been a release valve as much as a trigger.  

Contained at home is the easiest place for me to expand. The click of the door that signals aloneness is always accompanied by a sigh of relief, as automatic as Pavlov’s dog. Even when I love the person leaving. Even when hours of aloneness stretch out ahead with a kind of vertigo. 

But like fruit in a glass bowl, too much time at home causes putrefaction. Outside air is needed. I nod in agreement with friends at the challenges of lockdown. But secretly, I have often chosen too much solitude like this.

Aloneness can be many things. A too high dose is cotton wool wrapped around the soul. Alone we are unaccountable, hoarding our presence. Together we experience challenge, smoothing one another’s rough edges.

It can also be regenerative. Time alone moving slowly is like winter, a landscape peacefully drained of colour. The blanket of white sky muffles the unnecessary. We hear ourselves more clearly, shrugging off external identities like the final autumn leaves.

Meditation helps us to soften when we feel restless in our own company, and to sink into winter’s riches.

A meditation for winter

Observe the way your body is expanding and contracting. This happens effortlessly, even in your sleep, mirroring the Earth’s seasons.

Notice your pulse, your heart muscle expanding and contracting.

Become aware of your breath, lungs expanding and contracting.

Imagine you are sitting in a bubble of light that represents your presence.

Let yourself draw in and contract this as deeply as you need to, almost as if you are hiding.

And then to expand as fully as you like, filling the whole of your building and beyond.

As you breathe, expanding and contracting, you can try repeating the words,

“I am full” when breathing in and then,

“I am empty” as you exhale.