The Garden Way: Cultivating Intentionality in a Fast-Paced World.

The Things We Never Noticed Amidst the “Noise”…

We used to live in a large, urban area in Connecticut. We inherited my husband’s childhood home when his mom passed away. He wanted to sell it – I was sentimental and set out to fix it up. Fix it up, we did – and we lived there for fifteen years before we had the opportunity to move to a house in the country, closer to our oldest son and his farm. While we lived in the city, we created a garden that was the talk of our friends, with a wildflower border, a giant star magnolia that carpeted the grass with beautiful, pink petals in the spring, and an array of flowers and vegetables that no one expected to grow behind our brownstone home. We enjoyed our time living there.

When we moved to the country, our first night was eye-opening for my husband (a forever city-dweller). Our home backed up against a pasture with a narrow border of trees between our backyard and the open space. As we settled in for the night, my husband’s first comment was, “Why is it so damn dark?” I replied, “There are no street lights in the country.” He asked, “Why not?” And I asked him, “For what? Do you see any houses nearby?” He looked out the window and exclaimed, “Look at all the stars! Why are there more here?” I said, “They were ALWAYS here. You just can’t see them in the city, because there is so much light pollution.”

So, we tuck ourselves in, in the darkness of our rural home. Outside the window, from the darkness very close to our bedroom window, comes the haunting, loud call of a great horned owl. My husband, who declares owls as his favorite animal, became startled and asked, “What the hell was THAT?” I laughed and replied, “That was an owl.” He asked, “Why did it sound so close?” And I told him, “It’s probably sitting about 6 feet from our window. And guess what? Great horned owls are the most common owl in cities in Connecticut. You just didn’t hear them over the city noises at night.”

The next night, he marveled at the starlit sky before we retired for the evening. As we drifted off, there was another owl call – a barred owl – drifting across the pasture from the woodlot nearby. He asked again what it was, and I told him it was an owl. He said, “Oh, no, no, no – that sounds different from the sound we heard last night.” And I told him that was because it was a barred owl this time – not a great horned owl. He asked, “How many kinds of owls ARE there here?” And I said, “I don’t know, but it’s a lot.”

What Was Always There, the Darkness Reveals

In the city, the lights from cars, homes, streetlights, and businesses hid all but the moon and the brightest stars from our view. Similarly, the night noises – traffic, voices all night and day, sirens and music from nearby apartments – drowned out the sounds of the creatures that were there, but out of our notice: woodchucks that played on our neighbor’s shed, owls that nested in abandoned buildings, deer, foxes and songbirds that adapted to the hydrangeas, honeysuckle, volunteer maples and other plant life that grew in vacant lots and people’s tiny back yards. There were even black bears in the park in the center of the city. In the city’s noise and bustle at night, their presence was easy to miss.

During the winter months in the Northern Hemisphere, we sometimes balk at getting up in the dark and coming home from work in the dark. Some of us feel a little blue, with all that darkness and fewer daylight hours. The darkness, however, reveals things that we otherwise would miss, in the “noise” of brighter times: the Ursid meteor shower from December 17-26, an unusually bright show of Aurora borealis earlier this month, the mating calls of coyotes who are pairing up for their mating season next month, the cry of a newborn calf in a pasture a quarter of a mile away.

Similarly, dark times in our lives can often reveal actions, patterns, and people who need to be pruned away from our lives, a spark that we’ve been holding inside us, waiting to be fanned and tended, the bit of light that we want to bring forth into the next chapter of our lives, during brighter times. Such sacred pauses – whether taken intentionally or forced upon us by cataclysm or catastrophe – are the moments before renewal, when we confront what has been inherited, hidden, avoided, or out of balance in our lives. On the surface, such times are unwelcome interruptions to the status quo. Reframed, they become pivotal, liminal moments that allow us to choose differently. During such times, we can press pause and give ourselves the freedom to deconstruct old structures in our lives, listening beneath the noise for that still, small voice. We can let the darkness reveal what the light has been too bright to show.

Honoring Intuition and Alignment During Yule

During the 7th night of Yule, we can take the time to reflect on what needs to go, what has been awaiting our attention, and what we genuinely want to carry forward in our lives:

• What teachings, roles, or expectations no longer fit the person I’m becoming?
• What has my inner voice whispered to me that I couldn’t hear before?
• What is being revealed to me is that the bright light kept hidden.
• What am I trying to balance that was never mine to juggle, anyway?
• What is being revealed to me in this time of void?

Download The 12 Nights of Yule for a place to jot down your thoughts on this reflective time.

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