WINTER WALKS US HOME

In all directions, life of many sorts have returned to a state of rest. The deciduous have long since forsaken leaves and retreated to roots unseen, standing bare in the good company of evergreens. Even the last brave rabbits have taken to their burrows. The thickets remain as skeletons - save for a few leaves or rose hips here and there, caught frozen in varying stages of decay. 

In the winter, I wake and split dry kindling, kneeling in the frost with animal kin by my side. There is only the sound of corvid wings against the air and cedar parting from itself. In the evenings, I seek those who would nod in recognition to the constellations spilling from my chest. We make soup from the bones of beasts who once roamed forests not far from here. I want to know where you are from and what that really means. Tell me how you go about shedding the heavy coats of all that you have acquired. I want to know where it is you seek the parts of you lost along the way. Tell me of the things which act as bellows to keep your fire burning and body moving onward. This is a season for pockets of solitude, yes - but not for isolation.

Snow does not live so near the coast anymore; these winters it is a transient visitor, and with its arrival comes the excitement of a traveller bearing rare gifts. There is something protective and insulating about snow stretching to the horizon in every direction. I can feel even the memory of it breathing life into the embers of my core. As sea folk, we must now seek mountains for such a scene, or coax blizzards all the way down to these shores. Come winter, the steel brown terrain bears the colours of death’s flag. Still, there is much beauty to be found in these naked lands.

And what of the black that closes in around a brief day? What of the abyss from which all things came and toward which all things head? Is this dark not the colour of all ends and beginnings, where the tail meets the head and becomes itself again? 

What if you did not know this season as temporary? Surely this would feel like dying. Like the cessation of all beginnings - an unrelenting end that leaves no thing untouched. That first winter we ever know, was it like this? Were we not all just babes, and so that memory lays out of reach? But memories, even unremembered, are pervasive, and underscore everything. 

Perhaps you were a child born to summer, and that first winter felt a unique betrayal to what life had so far promised. Maybe you, like me, were born to the depths of winter. It was all you knew, and so there was a cold familiarity in such barren landscapes. A sedating stability in the dormancy of the dark season. One way or another, at some point someone must have whispered to us the dream of spring. Or perhaps we felt, both below and within, the stirrings of subterranean life as it grew restless at light’s building call. Light reached in, a little further, a little longer each day; stoking the embers of an earth full of secret beginnings. And no winter after this would ever be the same, once you had lived to know your first spring. To see with your eyes and feel in your bones the impermanence of the dark months. In this way the seasons gain trust, and teach faith. 

“This is how big life can be in each and every direction” the seasons say.

Do they not hold all the wisdom we seek in their patterns? Is their very nature not the immortal guides who answer when we pray to our unseen gods?

And it is perhaps winter the most that instills in us an unshakable faith in transformation. When the first woodland plants break through the soil at its tail end, something in us too breaks open again.

Belonging to this fractal alchemical process is among the few things that can quiet a mind when the moment feels full of only darkness.

And what is it to rest in the hands of the dark season?

I wake slow, with the day. Put the kettle on. Tend to what matters most.

Last night I could feel winter arrive as I slept. I dreamt of a forest so dark and saturated that I could fathom nothing but the black-green foliage and my own aging hands, wet as the salal.

A white-furred beast appears; standing out brilliantly against the unlit woods. They stand tall and lanky with a tusked grin.

“Follow me” they say. So I do.

And so it is that year after year, winter walks us home again.