ONE OF MY FAVORITE VAN MORRISON SONGS is called Fire in the Belly. A song that celebrates a new love and leases on life.
Van enthuses: "Stoke up my engine, bring me my driving wheel/Once I get started you’ll see just how I feel."
But then, as if from a forgotten footnote, a warning comes in the chorus: First, we have to “get through January”, and then “get through February.” Oh, right. Spring is over a month away. Now what?
That chorus acknowledges slogging. What this time of year can feel like for some of us.
The Winter Solstice, with its promise of increased light, has come (and gone). Christmas has peaked; and that quiet, prolonged communal 'time out' within December is spent. While the excitement and promise of a New Year have—admit it—started to wane.
So where are we exactly?
T.S. Eliot wrote about this lull and called it 'midwinter spring.' As if this period were its own customary time of the year. From the section titled Little Gidding in his Four Quartets, he describes this seasonally ambiguous zone:
Midwinter spring is its own season...
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?
What a mysterious notion: “This is springtime but not in time’s covenant.”
Time has been rearranged. Taken out of phase. And this is what the Sun’s passage through Aquarius and Pisces mirrors within our private and communal experience.
We’re in time but also not in time. Here. But not here. Haven't you noticed this lately?
You start something but then feel the urge to take a nap moments later—and forget about the whole project. Or you find yourself focused and channeling your muse at the oddest moments of the evening. Forget going back to bed. Time feels one step removed.
If you need an image: Picture a bear deep in hibernation. Asleep, but so much mysteriously at work in the dream and natural realm.
Midwinter spring redefines corporeal time and fosters our ability to imagine and cull insight from what the Buddhists call Great Time, or the Eternal Now.
The experience of time as singular—a one-pointed movement—free from the divisions of past, present and future. It is Great Time that Eliot explores through myriad poetic permutations in Four Quartets. The most cryptic of which appear in Little Gidding.
The two signs of the Zodiac that mirror the reality of Great Time are Aquarius and Pisces. And as the Sun nudges through Aquarius, we are 'entering' midwinter spring. Are you prepared?
Not sure, well, observe your Aquarius or Pisces friends. You'll recognize this unique relationship to time, when you consider their approach to life.
Both signs live as if they were exempt from the laws and concepts that structure quotidian existence for the rest of us. They follow, often unconsciously, their own unique time rhythms.
Aquarians experience time as a constant negotiation with the future. Meaning, they are on the lookout for what the rest of us aren't even aware of yet. That which is to come. They are frontrunners in the art of evolution.
While Pisceans experience time as a compendium of every event that has transpired. Like a mass of clay, time’s products can be fashioned into something startlingly beautiful or healing.
Consider what Einstein (a Pisces) did with the notion of time he’d ‘inherited’ from the scientific community.
Both Aquarius and Pisces are ‘not in time's covenant’, or you could say, are not in lockstep with consensus reality. We need to understand their unique orientation and we need to learn to experience that ‘time sense’ in our own lives at this time.
Here are your horoscopes for February.