Snowdrops: Markers of time - celebrating winter

“Snowdrops are like new thoughts arising out of the silence of winter.

But to notice them in our busy lives, we need first to remember to pause,

and then to listen into our own space of inner knowing”.

In the dark overlooked corners of the garden and fields, the flowers of January - the Snowdrops - are beginning to push through the earth and into the light.

They are a marker of time, and an invitation to celebrate winter, for in encountering this delicate and beautiful flower, they can give us pause. Instead of seeing the snowdrop as the beginning of a floral progression towards spring, it actually invites us into this very moment, into winter, into the now. For without winter, we have no summer, and without the dark we would not know light.

And after all, snowdrops are winter flowers, it is in the cold that they flourish.

So, the almost pure white snowdrop takes us into a conversation with the land, and particularly the dialogue of light and dark, offering us a unique opportunity and a reminder to enter the landscape with curiosity, and to seek out its stark beauty of contrasts.