Incubate This

I love being at the beginning of a cycle. There's excitement. It's palpable. There is hope. It's inspired with possibility. Which creates optimism. Even at the beginning of the soak cycle, there is a low-grade, bubbling kind of anticipation that goes with knowing you will soon have clean clothes to wear. Since I love the smell of clean clothes, the idea is a pleasant one. The only part I don't like about being at this point is the patience it requires. It's the tempering factor, the kind that lets the ideas incubate until they are ready to emerge into the elements. This part of anything is hard, although it feels great. This new annual cycle offers renewal and reconstitution for the weary, intimidated residents of Planet Earth. Winter's time is heavy and darker, something that shines only at night when it's coldest. I love that about winter.

Consider, along that same vein, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' writing about the wild woman archetype:

In archetypal lore, there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical "go forward and prepare a place for the soul" or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, "If you build it, they will come," preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance

Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their own right time, and over and over again.

Creating one thing at a certain point in the river feeds those who come to the river, feeds creatures far downstream, yet others in the deep. Creativity is not a solitary movement. That is its power. Whatever is touched by it, whoever hears it, sees it, senses it, knows it, is fed. That is why beholding a someone else's creative word, image, idea, fills us up, inspires us to our own creative work. A single creative act has the potential to feed a continent. One creative act can cause a torrent to break through stone.

For this reason, a woman's creative ability is her most vauable asset, for it gives outwardly and it feeds her inwardly at every level, psychic, spiritual, mental, emotive, and economic. The wild nature pours out endless possibilities, acts as birth channel, invigorates, slakes thirst, satiates our hunger for the deep and wild life. Ideally, this creative river has no dams on it, no diversions, and especiallly no misuse.

Wild Woman's river nurtures and grows us into beings that are like her: life givers. As we create, this wild and mysterious being is creating us in return, filling us with love. We are evoked in the way creatures are evoked by sun and water. We are made so alive that we in turn may give life out; we burst, we bloom, we divide and multiply, we impregnate, incubate, impart, give forth.
(Women Who Run with the Wolves, pp. 323-324)

It seems there is something to focus on in these periods of anticipation. Good luck with the incubation before you emerge.