Wintering
Embracing the threshold of a new season
Happy New Year, friends! And welcome to my newest subscribers. I appreciate you following along with my little essays here. I hope you find them valuable as we navigate 2025 together. :-)
Special thanks to my dear friend,
, who gave my blog a fresh look for 2025. If you aren’t following his writings on Substack, please go check them out. He is such a great writer and full of encouragement and inspiration!Also, I’m getting old - so for the same reason I still say I’m “taping” a TV show, I struggle with not double-spacing after a period, and I continue to call that week in June where every country music fan descends upon Nashville, anything other than “Fan Fair”, I can’t seem to call this thing that I write a “newsletter.” I still refer to this as my “blog” so forgive me if that’s uphip. It just feels more personal to me.
And now on to my first blog of 2025…
It’s January 1st, 2025. Wh-at?? Feels like some kind of futuristic date, doesn’t it? But here we are, crossing the threshold into another new year. It seems like the older I get, the faster time passes. Sometimes I yearn to find a way to slow down this life of mine. I feel I have so much I still want to do while I’m living on this earth, but the passing of time vividly reminds me that our days are limited.
My body reminds me of that too. I’ve had a rough couple of years, physically. A long bout of plantar fasciitis, followed by a fall off my front porch, proved to be a double-whammy on my body, because they both limited my ability to walk and exercise. As we all know, we have to “move it or lose it,” and I can feel myself losing it. Sigh… However, I’m not ready to give up on my body. Not just yet. The human body is an amazing thing. Its ability to heal itself always fascinates me. (*side note: I’m going to a new doctor this week, so if you are the praying kind, throw up a couple of prayers that I get some better direction toward healing. Thank you.)
The start of the new year is a threshold that many of us dread to cross. Not just because it signifies another year come and gone, but because it throws us into a new season. A season of wintering. I think the lights, decorations, and busyness of the holidays kind of mask the onset of winter. But then January hits and we suddenly go from this:
To this:
Whoa. Complete whiplash of the senses, right?
Winter can be depressing. It feels like everything is dead around us. The trees, flowers, and grass have lost their vibrant colors. Many of the rivers and lakes are iced over. Nothing seems to be living, breathing, flowing around us. I stepped outside yesterday and it was sooooo quiet. No birds singing, no people clattering about, no children playing in the yards. All I could hear was the wind blowing through the naked tree branches. But I’ve been reminded in recent years that the nature around me isn’t dead at all - it’s just resting. And maybe we can learn a thing or two from the wintering of nature. Rest. Reset. Renew. Every living thing needs this.
And rest doesn’t mean doing nothing. We can be actively “resting” and that’s how I try to approach this time of year.
I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions anymore, but I do try to make some goals. The difference for me is that resolution is something specific, like “I will workout every day this year.” Since I tend to be an “all or nothing” kind of personality, the first day I miss a workout, I just go, “Well, fork it. Blew that. Let’s go to McDonald’s!” You can probably guess how many resolutions I’ve kept in my life. (Hint: it’s less than one)
So now I do goals. They aren’t as specific, so if I get off track, I can regroup. One of my goals for 2025 is to become stronger in body, mind and spirit. That means I have to prioritize some form of exercise for all three. Whether it’s a physical, mental or spiritual “muscle”, it has to be worked on for it to become stronger. —(Full confession: I almost typed “prioritize some form of exercise for all three every day - but I took out the “every day” part, because that made it a resolution and not a goal.)
But resting and recovering is part of the process of growing stronger too.
I remember a few years ago, I decided to hire a personal trainer at my gym to help keep me accountable with my newly made resolution to work out every day and the first thing she told me was that I shouldn’t work out the same muscle group two days in a row, because they needed rest and recovery time in between workouts.
To grow stronger, we need rest too. We need a season of wintering.
“Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
In my recent blog, Wrapping Up The Year, I wrote about how most of our suffering comes from fighting against our reality. It’s the fight that wears us out. When we learn to accept what we have before us, it really is much easier.
Accepting the season of winter and working within it to restore ourselves really is a gift. Spring will be here soon with buds sprouting on the trees, yellow daffodils making their early entrance and the smell of fresh cut grass once again taking over our senses. It’s okay to dream of those days to come, but don’t forget the beauty of wintering.
Wintering is where it’s quiet enough to hear the whispers from God that can get muffled out in the busier seasons. It’s where we can feel free to say no to invitations that take us out in the cold. It’s where we have time to go inward and find ourselves.
Maybe it’s in wintering that we actually become ourselves.
Winter away, my friends… it’s okay. You aren’t alone. We are in this together.
“And don’t think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter. It’s quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.” — Rumi
Love…M
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What I’m reading right now: Searching for Sunday, by Rachel Held Evans
ABOUT SEARCHING FOR SUNDAY:
“Like millions of her millennial peers, Rachel Held Evans didn't want to go to church anymore. The hypocrisy, the politics, the gargantuan building budgets, the scandals--to her, it was beginning to feel like church culture was too far removed from Jesus. Yet, despite her cynicism and misgivings, something kept drawing Evans back to church.
Evans found herself wanting to better understand the church and find her place within it, so she set out on a new adventure. Within the pages of Searching for Sunday, Evans catalogs her journey as she loves, leaves, and finds the church once again.
Evans tells the story of her faith through the lens of seven sacraments of the Catholic church--baptism, confession, holy orders, communion, confirmation, the anointing of the sick, and marriage--to teach us the essential truths about what she's learned along the way, including:
Faith isn't just meant to be believed, it's meant to be lived and shared in community
Christianity isn't a kingdom for the worthy--it's a kingdom for the hungry, the broken, and the imperfect
The countless and beautiful ways that God shows up in the ordinary parts of our daily lives
Searching for Sunday will help you unpack the messiness of community, teaching us that by overcoming our cynicism, we can all find hope, grace, love, and, somewhere in between, church.”1
quote about Searching for Sunday taken directly from Amazon page.
“The roots are down there riotous.” What a delightful phrase.
"I don’t really make New Year’s resolutions anymore, but I do try to make some goals." - I feel you on this! I set some "intentions" this year, by which I think I mean pretty much the same thing as you mean by "goals." The all or nothing mindset is a goal killer, lol...