In this 2014 Year of the Horse, it is star-struck night skies, the Heart Nebula shining in the constellation Cassiopeia, Mercury at dawn, the Hunger Moon on the 14th, Europa and Callisto crossing Jupiter’s face, while Mars continues to brighten in Virgo in the morning sky. Named for the Latin term februum, which means purification, the clouds weep snow and books pile up, the mind elopes with summer dreams, and green shoots do a dress rehearsal beneath the hard sleeping earth. It’s a sigh of sweet stillness before the awakening. February also is a month of human darkness. In the high north it is a craving for sunlight, a binge of carbohydrates, a sinkhole of regret, with even the gentlest among us given to plotting revenge and moving about in a sludge of self-recrimination. This year, the continental United States received this brunt of arctic flow. How will their February be tallied up? The snow, once a novelty, collapses roofs and shoveling causes heart attacks. Cars pile up on Interstate highways. Shut in people turn on themselves. Snow babies are born nine months later. February laughs at it all. Because it knows it is neither good nor bad. It just is. It is your best warm thoughts, tested. It is your cocktail party banter turned back in on itself. It is a month offering a look inward. When nothing is growing outside, it can be, inside. Which leads into this quote: “Resolve to remain as strong, as determined, and as highly enthused during the darkest night of adversity as you are during the sunniest day of prosperity.” – Christian D. Larson Once I built giant snowmen with my February self-accusations that lasted through winter and beyond. Little did I know it takes years to melt them. To undo this kind of thinking. We so unknowingly continue to bludgeon ourselves. But it is the February that leads in that also offers a way out. If you can come to love February, you can come to love anything, and in anything is the everything. This is what Jazz musicians try to tell us everyday. This is what the Gnostics sing about. This is what was originally written with charcoal on cave walls. These are the dinosaur footprints in the shale of our true beginnings. This is what everyone from Jesus to Einstein is trying to tell us. And please, don’t just automatically attack my presumptions, reflect upon it. Think about the February you just had and how it can be more. Think about how carbon stardust becomes a fish that becomes man that becomes God that becomes the creator of big bang worlds over and over again, always rushing toward a new beginning, a new thought, an unsung song, dimensionless, floating, rising up into the who knows what of the eternal mystery, that stirs in everything, wheels like starlings all at once, sings like Mercedes Sosa, calls like whales in the sonic blue sea, always beckoning, beckoning, beckoning, into a unified ocean that is always seeking to unite us all with the everything that is. And the everything that will be. I sing this all to you Like a stone at the bottom of a primal pond, Remembering everything . . .
4 Comments
Mary
2/24/2014 06:18:30 am
So true about February! I never realized it but what you write about happens every year while hoping for Spring and longer sunlight at night we forget to see the beauty in the month and just try to whisk it away. Purification and new awakening is necessary. Great pictures for the runt of the litter month!!!
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Erika MarĂa
2/26/2014 02:49:04 am
These words were like a new rose in my garden... inspiring, I love February, San Valentine, candies, sweet messages, stary sky at night, Mercedes Sosa and her "Here I am to offer my heart"... Inspiring month, Inspiring you.
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Andy Monaco
3/4/2014 02:25:58 am
I LOVE February; it is the month of my birth, it signals the dark before the dawn; with March impending, the snow and cold are just shadows of battle weary soldiers, already waving a flag of surrender...
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Mary
3/4/2014 06:21:32 am
Andy - I love February too it is my birth month too!!! Happy belated birthday to you Andy.....Mary
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