January is for Helleborus

At first I thought I would write about Snowdrop for January, but then Helleborus appeared to me and it felt right for it to come first.

Here on the Pacific North coast, January is rain. Cloud cover means dim light.

And January feels like Helleborus because it is a little dreary, introspective, quiet.

When I first found Helleborus I was walking the puddly sidewalks of Vancouver, happy as a clam with my rainpants and accepting of getting wet and smelling the part.

The rain is nice when we don't try and stay dry - it always wins anyway.

Helleborus looks a bit sad and dead-leaf-like from above.

It feels (and sometimes looks) like me in January now that I think of it, sad and a bit dead-leaf-like.

Yet there's something soothing about dying a little in the winter. When my shoulders are stooped and my head feels heavy, the rain rolls off a little easier.

There's a nostalgia to the new year. The year prior starts to decompose in its dark-brown-wealth way. Like all that life we grew - accomplishments, relationship, creations - they too, accept to wither and enrich our heart-soil once more.

Funny how everything we put out comes back to us, even if it does involve dying.

Hibernating isn't dying even though it feels that way. It's more of a cosmic reset, but under the soil with worms and stuff.

That's what Helleborus teaches me. I just see sad stuff from up top, but the minute I bend down, like that first time in Vancouver, is the minute I realize. When you make the effort to twist your neck from down back up again - kind of like how you can look at the sky from under your armpit in downward dog - you see it.

You see the centre of the flower, all perfect and joyful, asking nothing of anyone.

All of a sudden you see hell - He - bore - us .

For the Christians here I think of Jesus bearing sin for re-birth.

Perhaps the flower does the same.

It seems Helleborus too has felt the weight of the world.

As deep a love we find, as deep a sorrow when it dies.

So it too has decided that its core is too precious to go unnoticed. We're going to feel the sorrow one way or another, so we might as well fall deeply in love with all of this.

Flowers wouldn't be so improbable if they didn't come out of the mud.

And so Helleborus in its earthen tones beckons us. Look a little closer. Draw inwards a little deeper.

You too have a sun at your centre.

And you too are exactly where you need to be right now.

Izzy <3