After the Light Turns
The Ice Goddess is Listening
It’s New Year’s Eve.
The quiet authority of winter has already settled in. Walking among the visitors at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, I overhear murmurs as they encounter her: She’s the Virgin Mary. She’s Gaia, the Earth Goddess. She’s a Greek or Roman goddess.
In her way, she holds all of these projections. And still, she exceeds them. As we cross the bridge above her, pass through the corridor beneath her, or stand before her in awe, she extends an open hand—not asking for belief, but inviting attention. Water speaks as it trickles through her fingers, carrying something unnamed with it.
Emerging from the long memory of the Earth, she is about five times my height. I lift my eyes to meet her glowing indigo face. Indigo, the ancient hue of the third eye, the color of mystery and majesty. Her furrowed brow bears the trace of deep listening, as if the intelligence of the natural world has been speaking to her for eons. The land beneath my feet remembers through her.
She reflects how a modern city imagines winter, femininity, and the sacred through art and illumination.
She doesn’t need to open her eyes. She feels the past, the present, and what is quietly asking to be created next.
She is listening for what stands between us and peace.
When I look more closely, I realize her hand is not delicate. It’s a working hand. I recognize it immediately from growing up on a farm, where hands learn by feel early. The water does not pour from her hand as much as pass through it, as if the movement is already known by heart. Winter lives here; even frozen water is still subtle energy in motion.
Today, New Year’s Day, I think again of her working hand and the water passing through time. The year opens, as years do, with a thousand invitations to begin. But winter suggests another posture. Not grasping. Not forcing. Just learning, again, the feel of what moves and what stays. Somewhere between stillness and motion, the Ice Goddess listens.
And I find myself listening, too.