Don't fight the winter

Years ago, I took a class on the spirituality of winter. One lesson that stuck with me is this: the fallow seed and the hibernating animal are, in their way, quite active. We don’t survive the winter; rather, we flourish because of it. 

This idea is the throughline of Katherine May’s Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. The book explores the dark, the cold, and the natural rhythms of regeneration. It’s a wonderful companion for the season.

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

Related: We have turned the year.

GIF by Alexandra Dvornikova.