The Gift of Winter
Growing up in Florida, I felt as though I never got to really experience winter. Yes, I was able to feel the fluctuation of temperature drop as we reached the winter months, but I was never able to experience what it was like to slow down, go inward, tend to the things that didn’t have to do with the outside world, be more in solitude and in silence.
Of course, living in an industrialized and fast-paced society, this is not necessarily the norm for what winter now looks like. At least it wasn’t for most of my life. In Florida, that’s when the gardens are pumping, when people are spending more time traveling with family or friends, and we’re gearing up for the year to come with parties and gatherings.
However, this is also the theme of what the entire year is like. It’s as if we are all living in perpetual summer. And the idea of slowing down is seen as non-productive, lazy, or inefficient. We have to keep up with the rat-race in order to win, succeed, or get anywhere. If we stop to slow down, we’re going to be behind. We think that “grind culture” is what’s going to bring us success & feel deep within our bones that if we don’t keep working and stay productive that we are doing something inherently wrong.
This left me completely burnt out. I’m sure many others have or are experiencing this too, or being burnt out just becomes normal. And what’s fascinating about this burn out is that when I experienced it to its depths, I was working as a permaculture project manager.
You would think that as we work in permaculture, we would align ourselves with the seasons, right? We would live cyclically, operating in the rhythms that Nature operates. This was farthest from the truth. Within this program, there was never time for rest. Especially in winter, where the program was the busiest.
Without rest, there isn’t a place to slow down, be with our own thoughts, reflect and listen to feedback, and allow the body, mind, and spirit to regenerate. We continue on this perpetual momentum of ascension, growing a mile wide and an inch deep. Within slowness, rest, and winter, there is time for depth to be created, for wisdom to be cultivated, for dreams to be dreamt, and for a new, yet ancient world to be born.
As Tricia Hersey, @thenapministry, reflects, “The veil is lifted when we rest.”
The more we root into rest, the more the veil of separation and illusion is lifted, the more connected we are to all the beautiful parts of ourselves, the more we dismantle white supremacy, capitalism, and colonization within ourselves, and the more we show up in the world from our wholeness & humanness.
As I look out at the landscape in my current home in Taos, New Mexico, I see Nature working it’s intelligent magic as the plants go dormant during this season, the snow packs on top of the soil, and the Earthships are gratefully collecting the rainwater as the snow melts. It may seem that nothing is happening during this time, but this time of dormancy is essential as regeneration is happening deep within the soil.
This is the same as our inner landscape. We may pooh-pooh the importance of rest, but it is essential for us to go through a season of decomposition, inward focus and reflection, slowness, nourishment, day-dreaming, visioning, and rebirth. This is the time when we can really cultivate the depth within us, within our communities, within our work, and within our world.
Even if we are not in the season of Winter, we may be pulled in our lives to be in an “inner winter,” requiring us to take a deep pause and go inward for however long that season lasts. Please know that if you feel this call, it is necessary for your journey, and there is nothing wrong with it or you.
This is the current focus for my course The Winter Journey of Sacred Endings, as we bask in the importance and beauty of winter, diving inward and releasing what no longer serves us in this dark fertile time.
My question to all of us is - how do we honor the season of winter, even when we’re not living in climates that experience the fullness of it? How can we make space for rest, reflection, inward focus, and nourishment in our day-to-day life? And what stories do we have associated with our resistance to rest?
Lastly, I recognize the privilege in being able to embody rest in my life and I continue to dream of a world where everyone feels they are able to sink into the medicine of rest as it is a birthright to us all.
