Every now and then I run across something that I think is perfect during Lent. Maria Popova in her blog, Brainpickings, reminds us that Rilke once described winter as “the season for the tending of the inner garden of the soul.” Lent is also such a season.
She also talks about a wonderful book by Katherine May who writes in Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times the following:
[Since childhood] we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.
Lent is a time of self-examination and if we ignore sadness our examination is not complete. Embrace it, and learn from it.
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