Whether it be a little - or a lot - winters are designed to break you.
This is what winter does to us.
Imagine treading water in an ocean warmed just enough, but then you begin feeling a slight chill. Shuddering ever so slightly. You can still shake it off though, leaving the faintest hint of goosebumps forming.
You are already cold, so you don’t notice it’s only getting colder.
Not right away at least.
By the time you start seeing your breath and icicles have started to form on your eyelashes and brows, it’s too late. Kicking the current against you is an impossibility. There are solid blocks and resistance where there once was free-flowing water. Eventually, you are encased like a mosquito in amber.
Suspended in time until the next thaw.
Until spring. Le printemps.
But that’s just for the nereids who were too absentminded to notice in time. Beautiful things tend to lose their sense of danger, self-preservation when kept in captivity for too long. It’s enough to make you wish you hadn’t been treated so preciously.
This is what winter does to us.
It’s all so convenient, the shifting of the seasons. From balmy summer and its lofty promises, the air thick with heat and smoke and the buzzing of cicada wings, to autumn and the satisfying crunch of the moldy leaves and growing stillness and somberness, to the consuming and unyielding and willful winter.
The degree of hypervigilance I exist with means I know to exit the pool, retreat from the lake.
No, I’m far too acquainted with my flaws and weaknesses. And my girlhood was robbed from me at so young an age, a part of me wishes I could be more unaware of the change from warm and hospitable to bleak and hostile.
I will say, only once, I did stray and forget myself. I was lulled into a false sense of security and such an icy, glass enclosure. It was then that I learned how exotic fish must feel. How wretched it must feel to have been ripped from familiar waters and thrown hastily into a too-small fishbowl. Large, dumb eyes staring back at me. Tapping at the glass, calling me everything but the name that is mine.
This is what some winters do to us.
This time, I opted to spend my wintering like a seed. Planting myself, petitioning a greater power that I might receive the just-right water from ice rain and blankets of snowfall.
You cannot fathom how cold it has been beneath the earth, residing in the soil.
Co-mingling with dormant ants and slowed, sleepy beetles.
My stay down below was equal parts requirement with the motion of the seasons and opportunity. Burying oneself is sometimes the surest way to guarantee survival. It is only when you’re nestled underground that you can finally hear yourself think. You are but a seed, so there is no one there to trample you. There is no precocious preteen in sight to pluck your petals in the spirit of childish superstition. He loves me, he loves me not…he loves me….. The ground is frozen and the neighborhood dogs in their cold intolerance and hatred of their booties have little interest in digging you up and casting you out for the birds to find.
Some winters are a welcome reprieve.
While I have been down below, I have had ample time to contemplate what should take root and what should be left to die and turn over with all the other dead things in and around.
The intoxicating breeze of July and the smells of grilled food and foliage feel like time itself is expanding. It’s as though we can live entire lifetimes in the container of 24 hours. Under the penetrating rays of the August sun where everything feels possible and owed to us, it is easy to lose sight of how much some things need to come to an end.
Winter gives us these little deaths so we don’t lose perspective.
Winter knows there’s a cycle to everything.
My time underground, with the lack of light and my eyes obscured by the earth, has forced me to learn to see in other ways, and this new form of knowing has invited new insights. These new downloads are exhilarating and devastating and maddening and stirred growth and hunger. I couldn’t separate them if I wanted to. Try as we all may to apply hacks along the way, there’s nothing like simply surrendering to the work and the process to get you where you need to go.
Winter knows receiving truths is liberating, though liberation comes at a cost.
What is no longer for me is driven further beneath me. It is not fully out of sight so I don’t repeat my old mistakes, but my fresh green roots demand to burst forth to become more than the hardship that preceded me.
True growth requires knowing that to be a seed means knowing you will not be a seed forever. To be a seed is to become a sprout and a seedling and eventually a less particular offshoot all your own. And it means knowing that within every stage, there are cycles.
Thank you for these gifts and lessons in such sacred geometry, Winter.
Winter’s final set of parting words is that while a date on the calendar may herald the end of one season and the start of the much-anticipated springtime, there is still a chill in the air. There is still the potential for snowfall. The days are approaching sunshine even if they aren’t pure sunshine.
The first lesson of spring is that awakening from the earth isn’t to be a violent punch up from the void, but more of a big cat stretch after a long, restful night’s sleep. Feel it with every fiber of your being, bask in the glow.
But do not rush.
Spring unfurls for the ones that earn it. Express gratitude for the thaw and water your fresh hopes daily. And do not forget the lessons of winter.
They will help you keep the pace and appreciate and savor every slow progression into the warming embrace deeper and deeper into spring.
Spring’s first lesson on a day that is as bright as it is dark is to remember that you hold both light and shadow within you at any time. While your shadow may be waning in the days, weeks, and months to come, the lessons you learned while under it are not there to taunt you but to help you live better. It is this very shadow that guided your light side to make you an even more formidable you.
Don’t forget these lessons as you burst out of your icy enclosure or cold earthen home.
From my thawing heart to yours, I wish you the best spring as you emerge from the depths of your wintering. Here’s to much bountiful basking in the warming days to come.