Below Zero Balm
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
“That’s the gift of winter: it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Deep freeze for the next week.
Winter has arrived a few months late.
An invitation within, to our own wintering.
Slowing, stillness, pause.
Quiet is loud.
Most try to outrun and avoid it with over busy and frantic activity.
Precise maps rather than adventures into unknown terrain.
“Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Go off trail. Meander.
Let winter do its work in and for you.
Rest, reorder, renew.
Explore, discover, wander.
Regular field trips to the Como Conservatory to find new colors, hues and life are healing balm.
10 minutes away.
Take a field trip within and without each day. Right in your own neighborhood.
No permission slip required.
Go on the hunt for awe, wonder, beauty, still points to spark attention, awareness and gratitude. Then sit with it awhile.
Softening, reorienting, reawakening work in progress.
Unfolding.
Spring by going through, not bypassing, winter.
“In our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to show the way that it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us good. We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
