The Wisdom of Winter
“Chill airs and wintry winds,
My ear has grown familiar
With your song,
I hear it in the opening year,
I listen,
And it cheers me long. ”
February 2025:
As the year begins, there seems to me to be a sense of impatient anticipation. Of waiting and waiting, for a winter that has been rather later in the coming.
As the season deepens into midwinter, and the festivities and lights of the year gone by already begins to dim into memory and sink into the shadows of time, the familiar, simple, humble rhythms of my small life in these woods continues to hold me, while I wait for the wintering gifts that have not yet come to pass, in our neck of the woods.
Although december feels so far away already, I keep the joyfulness and hopefulness of that season alive in small ways inside my own cottage, cocooned away from Mother nature’s relentless march out in Her domain.
Wool work is of course, central to my wintering work. This beautiful material from nature that allows me to root more fully and more instinctively, into a season that I might have otherwise struggled to feel at home in. Both fragile and resilient, strong and malleable, I feel the need to work with wool in more ways than just in making the insulating garments that hold me in their sheaths of comfort and warmth.
In winter, I feel the need to have wool all around me. And to give this precious material life and form in ways that bring me joy and make me love a season that might have otherwise been one of darkness, despair.
This has been what wool has given me. The gentlest armor that allows me to open myself to the cold yet potent gifts of midwinter.
A mysterious contradiction about this season, is that despite the bareness of the tress, the hardness of the frosty earth, and the feeling that the earth is so very old, it is also a season which brings into sharp contrast the great riches that even the simplest life bestows on us. The simple acts of tending to your most basic needs, of cooking, baking, feeding your family, become even more imbued with significance and importance at this time of year.
This is something I’ve come to realize only as I’ve grown older, that the more I live in tune with nature’s rhythms actually allowing my priorities to shift with the shifting seasons, the more Life’s riches open up to me. So that not even the hardness of winter can touch that inner wisdom; that life is so very full, and that nature is so very generous.
In the hyper-modern technological era we live in, there’s an overwhelming barrage of distraction, of attacks on our individual and collective sensorium. There’s a constant stimulation of sights and sounds and opinions on what it means to Live Well, on what Success and Happiness should look like.
We all of us fall prey to the demand that we prove, that we validate our very existence by participating in the cacophony of the internet and media and consumption.
And it is a trap.
Because how can we possibly nurture and renew the all important, fertile ground of our inner life, of that silent and watchful core from which all our activity and creativity springs forth, if we are not allowed the time and space in which to continue growing, healing, restoring, and shoring up our life energies so that we may blossom into the fullness of our promised spring?
In a culture that no longer supports nourishment of body and mind, that normalizes burnout, even glorifies it, that applauds productivity as the greatest merit, while demeaning rest and reconnection to nature as laziness and weakness, is it any surprise that our collective experience as humans beings have become so fraught with disconnection and dysfunction?
I have lived the wrong way at many junctions of my own life. I have felt the impoverishment, of both body and mind and energy, of the deep depletion when you neglect the whisperings of nature to slow down, to dig deep, to shore up and wait for the time of activity.
So this winter has been a returning for me. A turning inwards, a time of allowing rest, of taking exquisite pleasure in the smallest acts that frame these cold and dark days.
And the deeper I allow myself the freedom to enjoy quiet moments, like walking through the woods and picking dried foliage for my vases, like taking my time to stroke the moss on our grandpa Maple tree behind the wellhouse, like lingering over the beauty of oso berry buds, that wait so patiently from october to march, without words or thoughts or the filters of the intellect to interrupt the flow of wisdom that happens when you are at one with the woods around you.
The inner life is everything. And in it I have found the keys to my liberation and my thriving in this world, sitting and twinkling quietly at me, like frost glimmering on woodland paths on winter nights, waiting to be discovered.
