not my season/waiting for my season

At the beginning of yoga class this morning, the teacher encouraged us to focus on the places in our bodies where we felt light. My attention drifted through all my chakra centers—third eye, head, throat, heart, belly, pelvis, root—and found these energy centers tightly wound, clenched, and anything but light. 


By the end of class, I could feel my breath and attention flowing more smoothly through my whole being, but residual tension remained. As I walked around the indoor track, glimpsing towering snow piles and frigid sunshine, I longed for a warmer season. 


I feel like a flower bud, tightly folded against the elements, waiting for warmth, sunshine, and gentle rain to coax my petals open. One of my favorite quotes, shared with me years ago by a dear friend came to mind: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom," Anaïs Nin. 


And yet, not. 


Now is not, it seems, the time to blossom. 


Now is the time to sink in, to grapple with those cold spaces and darknesses, those encounters that leave me feeling like an awkward, shy, unliked seventh grade girl again. To take the measure of my incessant worries and fears. To approach these moments and anxieties and vulnerabilities and calculate their true size. To come to that clean, pure, shining place within where I can believe, wholeheartedly, in the magnificence of life. Of my life. 


Of me. 


And then, come Spring, to unfurl.