My Understanding of Winter

So.

I've been thinking. (As usual.)

Been marinating in the idea of winter lately. For a good long while, actually.

Although it's been an exceptionally mild winter this year as compared to the last few, we are still in the midst of it - and the middle of an actual cold snap! - and I've been thinking about what winter truly means.

Winter is a season, of course. A space in which we live our lives differently than we do the rest of the year. A space for layering and bedding down and keeping the cold out and the warmth in. A space for times of great celebration and generosity and family gatherings... And all that those entail.

Winter is a time of death, waiting for its resurrection; of earth full of grief; of the laying down of life; of decay... As in the tale of Demeter and Persephone.

In my mind, winter has always been a time of waiting.

Waiting for the cold to end.

Waiting for the sun to come back.

Waiting for life to return to the rhythms we find through spring, summer and fall... Winter's rhythm has always found its place in waiting.

I know in some places - like my hometown of Miami - winter isn't much different than the rest of the year. Still sunny, still warm, the winter days are much like the summer ones, except it's slightly-less-than-hellishly-hot.

But here, things are different. There is a marked change of seasons that I love with every ounce of my soul. I love the marking of time through the seasons, and the movement of life. Such beautiful transitions.

But lately, I've discovered that my ideas are shifting of what winter really is.

We've spent some time outside recently, in the woods (Yes, there are woods in my urbanesque life!), and it was there that my thoughts really began to gel... Until then, I'd not really been able to put words to the feeling; it was just an odd sort of knowing that winter was MUCH MORE than I'd given it credit for.

I began noticing all the signs of life in the middle of these cold-barren trees, dead grass and sullen rains. In fact, the natural world was teeming with life. Not the vibrant, twittering, sunny glowing life of summer, no. No, this is a DIFFERENT sort of life. It holds the rich and earthy smell of moss and the color green.

Despite the snow (what little there has been) and leafless existence of the trees, now suddenly even the dirt looks alive to me... I hear the birds singing their winter songs and wonder, "Why has it always seemed so quiet before?" I watch the squirrels chase each other, flying through the trees, and think how happy they must be just to have another day. I uncover an earthworm quite by mistake and realize that its work is moving forward just as it had on those hot July days not so long ago.

So here I've thought all this time that winter was a time of dying before the act of truly living could begin... When instead, it's just been a different kind of living all along. One just as important, where we have to dig down deep into our roots to find the sustenance that we need to savor the moments before we burst into bloom.

I'm not in the space of the phoenix in death, waiting for its rebirth into the fiery glory of living, of spring, oh no. WINTER IS LIFE. Abundant, brilliant life.

A different kind of beautiful living, certainly. A different kind of life. But everywhere I look, I see it. I see life.

And that's the one I want to live. No matter what season I happen to be in.

So no more waiting. Time to jump in, eyes wide open.