Winter's Approach

A Reflection

It’s been too long. Time to say something, but what? Soon, it will be the end of another year—another hibernation, a time of burrowing deep and reconsidering everything. No one told me this about wintertide, this season of ever-shortening days, how it can be a moment of renewal if you know what to look for.

But I am learning to watch and witness.

The leaves blowing across still-green grass, the chilling of another day in subtle but notable degrees. All clues, indications of another reality, persisting but not insisting on being noticed. There is novelty here, down in the nether-ness of a year, something profound found at the bottom, in the darkest dead of things.

Photo by Timur Romanov on Unsplash

This season of sudden, uncontrollable shivers and questions as to how well one spent a year, this time of potential discontent, is not a death. But an invitation into a subtler form of living:

Quiet down, and you can hear the sounds of birds not migrated. Search deep, and you will see sprouts of life springing from dirt and tree branches. We are not done yet, it all seems to say. This time is not a quick and demanding change but another careful step on the ever winding staircase of being. Where does it lead? Nowhere particular, maybe up. Towards something more, something greater, something not yet seen.

This striving toward the unreachable may be the most of what makes us human. Even, and especially, in winter we look to spring. When everything wants to fold in on itself, when the cold forces you to contract—can you feel it now, the desire to shrink yourself and gather in for warmth?—at this time, we face an opportunity.

To look inside the apparatus of ourselves. To engage in that aspect of the creative that is not so much productive as inductive. That which slowly stirs other things gradually into being. This is a chance to turn to something less visible. To cease activity and let other forces work their powers.

Here, in this season of liminality, change occurs. It is not forced or premeditated, only done when needed. Through season’s change, we see the whole, a never-ending series of starts all bleeding into one, colliding in atomic unity. Life from death. Light to dark. Winter as gradual realization of spring. It’s hidden things working to produce the visible, that’s what winter is: a quiet symphony.

And we are compelled to join the chorus. To not only watch as what could be takes on its own latency but to participate in the change itself. We can see the sickliness of leafless branches and accept their promise, that of a blank page ushering in a new chapter. Every rich and vibrant thing comes from something dark and cold, void produces everything.

Here is our choice. We can sink with the solstice and let death do what it does—produce more life—or bemoan the passing of time. When the earth seems farthest from its sun, things begin to brighten. The darkest night is the truest beginning. This is something impossible, but we need not only believe it but see it. It is a funerary time of renewal, not as something to mourn but as a procession to observe.

It is time to die, nature reminds. Time to quiet our souls and contemplate what is soon fading. And yet, we resist. With our screens and infatuations, our fad diets and crash workout routines, rushing from here to there and back to here again, we who are frantic are invited to release, to slumber, to nap for as long as is needed. How else can buds break forth?

It is funny how she tricks us, nature with her alleged lack, her refusal to blossom for months. But there’s more, always more. Nothing goes away, nothing ever actually dies. It only gets buried with the walnuts, waiting for some curious squirrel. And we, too, wait. Not passively or actively, but naturally.

Today, I am stirred by the aliveness of transition, how the dying of day explodes into starry night, with a thousand hues and more if it’s cold tonight. The gray of winter setting stage for summer. It’s coming, it’s going. It’s here already.

I try to quiet down, try to pay attention. I want to walk slowly through the neighborhood, to peek in on the diorama and see what wants to unfold. Maybe it’s the Indian in the cupboard or the nutcracker performing some valiant display of courage. Maybe it’s the old man walking his dog. This is life in the cold: short slow days, steady white winter movement. There is determination here, patience required in such a season. And how much life we find here may depend wholly on how much cold we allow. But we won’t know for sure until it gets warm.