Divination in winter

In the deep of winter, my favorite time of day to do divination is right after sunset, when the sky turns to silk and the clouds bedeck themselves in the gilded finery of twilight. I adore how the snow becomes a mirror for those subtle, silken hues of drowsy sun right after it has tucked itself into the snowy hillside and disappeared for a long winter night’s sleep. My senses sharpen in this refracted light, and my body wants to drop everything and wander, wide-eyed, outside. Like a deer, something ancient in me knows that when the sun sets it’s time to go roaming. Roaming in the gloaming. If I stay close to the tree line, I imagine I am almost invisible, or easily mistaken for a bear, or a wolf?  

Some days are so busy my only excuse to get outside is to take the short trip to the compost bin and back. But at twilight, this chore becomes a whole new journey - an adventure betweox and betweonum (I prefer the old anglo-saxon origins of our modern betwixt and between), where all is alive, when the outlines of familiar shapes go fuzzy in the murky dusk, eyes straining until vision doubles and the rational mind is forced to give way, leaving the door of imagination unguarded and wide open for the wilder fancies and whimsies of the dreaming. I put my hood up and feel very much the wortcunning wytch, bucket of decomposing kitchen scraps swinging by my side. I nearly always find some treasure of earth on this little jaunt to the compost bin. A quartz pebble that glows like the moon. A desiccated mouse skull left by the cats. A clumped nest of silver-gray seeds crowning the Queen Anne’s Lace. A brave green sorrel leaf just barely escaped from its ice prison. 

I sometimes linger out there, looking back at the house. I usually try to allow myself even just a few breaths in the numinous In-Between before shuffling back to the electric lights, radiant heat and evening bustle of family weekday life. Sometimes I take a minute and let the world speak to me in its Oracular voice, casting out with my mind into the great beyond. I ask silly-goose questions like, what say you, wisp of cloud? Or, more solemnly, I wonder,  what can be known in the echo of the goose’s call? What messages hover in the bare tree limbs as they press against the light box of evening sky? Sometimes all I get as an answer is the cold breeze and the nagging thought of an email I forgot to send. But often, if I timed my compost shuffle at the right moment of dusk, I get an answer, loud and clear. Like I said, divination is easy in winter.