Winter's pause

The passion of summer's urge and verve has pressed the leaves from the trees, now crunched and coerced into languid streams of reds and oranges and molted golds. Winter's quiet pause heralds the light that soon enough will sing into frost singed windows and across horizons of long distant dreams, remembering for us the rhythms and harvests of time.

What makes a life? The hours and days and years can seem eternal when we are caught in the torrent of doing, skirting aversion to what is clinging to us now, longing for what we believe will bring us happiness. Yet when we look back to all that has passed, time's immutable edifice dissolves into grains of sand that slip from our grasp, over the fleeting edge of all that we have known and hoped would be.

Poet Mary Oliver writes "To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work." That is what mindfulness is. Paying attention with reverence to all that arises, all that passes away. Not looking to gain anything from this external world, but instead letting go of our expectations, our desires and ambitions, loosening our touch on the grains of existence and the tethers that beckon us to do more, just a little bit more.

Winter has a way of resetting us and our course in life. It shares in its dark solitude the chance to listen intensely to the circadian rhythm that pulses with each dawn and each breath. Through the prism of still awareness the season beckons us to discover the rapture of a sunbeam kissing the frozen earth or savour the rarefied joy of one graced minute of a busy morning to bend down and touch the awe in your child's eyes.

The new year spreads wide its arms, gifting us with countless opportunities for deepening into mindfulness. Consider our Applied Mindfulness Meditation Certificate, new for us this year in collaboration with University of Toronto, Factor-Inwentash, Faculty of Social Work (Continuing Education). Whether it be for a certificate or an afternoon, we hope you will join us in the coming months.

From all of us in Continuing Studies, may you and your loved ones find peace and beauty in each rare moment.

Tess Wixted
Learning Associate

Visit us at cstudies.royalroads.ca.