Where I live, pretty much everything dies, hibernates, goes dormant, or flies away for the winter. Water stops flowing and becomes hard and heavy as a rock. There are days when the slightest breeze against skin is physically painful. The sun sets at 4:30.

And every year, there is that inevitable moment, usually around late January, when we hit the bottom of winter – when things feel so impossibly frozen and lifeless that our bodies temporarily forget that summer ever existed.

But there’s a rightness to winter. Because it’s just the truth – deep and abiding realness.

Winter reminds me of so many things. That stasis cannot support life. That death is essential. That as much as I think I want eternal, unchanging summer, I know in my bones there is something not right about that.

I sometimes think I want forever summer in my own life too – that energy must always be moving, ideas always flowing, activity always happening. But unchanging levels of energy and constant activity is its own type of stasis. And stasis is not organic. Stasis is not alive.

But we are alive, so winter happens inside of us too. And these times of dormant inactivity and motionless stagnation are required happenings in our own life-cycles and inner seasons. To live, create, and claim our own aliveness, we must make our own descents into winter.

And rather than fighting it, how might we embrace its gifts of quiet, stillness, rest, and death, knowing we are held inside of larger natural forces of life, death, and rebirth that carry us forward and around into a new moment, season, or possibility?