Winter that Came in the Spring

March 2025:

Starting as George Orwell began his poetic piece on the arrival of spring, “Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the snowdrop…”, came the winter I had longed and longed for. 

This past winter has seemed particularly challenging for me. I’ve waited and waited for the snows that used to come and go so heavily and predictably from October to January. But a snow that comes late is better than one that doesn’t come at all. 

The sweetness of snow arrived at last in February. Living on the lower slopes of the Olympic mountains, lorded over by mountain rain shadow and old growth evergreen forests, which loom and sway over the cottage on all sides, snow is a deeply needed bringer of light, and quiet, and an energy of restfulness that is actually quite magically invigorating. 

While that may sound like a contradiction, I think that in Nature there are no contradictions. Only Balance.  So, as the world around me was hushed and lulled to sleep by the snow, I felt like I woke up, for the first time all winter. 

Snow has an energy all its own. An ancient song, vibrating, and pulsing, and sweeping away the heavy cobwebs of wintry inertia with its cold and quiet  ferocity. I can feel it in the way the light in the cottage changes as the first snow settles on the boughs of the cedars. That deeply familiar, ancient energy of snow light settles into shadows and corners of the house, lifting everything up, breathing life and light and a sense of ease that makes you feel that all is as it should be with the world.   

This year, this winter-spring snow brought me out of the homebound doldrums of the weird mildness of November to January. I’m always as excited as my children to rush into the snow and enjoy every precious moment of it. 

Living in the pacific northwest means that your winters are never bare or leafless. There’s always the sea of ferns and evergreens that swell and sway from the deep blue of the pacific ocean to the snow capped peaks running the length of this peninsula. But in winter, the green is decidedly muted. Less alive. 

So when it snows….everything in nature seems gilded and uplifted. Just as I am, I suppose

Spring is often spoken of as the miracle of nature. But in truth, if you pay enough attention to Mother Nature and all her abundant forms, each season has its own particular flavour of the miraculous. Each is full of miracles, small and large.

And as the climate around these woods continues to change and shift so dramatically towards milder and milder winters, Snow seems to me to be the biggest miracle of all. With each passing year, it becomes harder to believe that the snow will ever come at all. 

And yet…here it is. Holding me and healing me in its quiet yet undeniable strength 

I feel an ability to surrender to the energy and physicality of snow, in a way I haven’t surrendered to any other elemental force in my life. For an island girl, born and raised just under 10 degrees north of the equator, this is a very strange feeling indeed. 

Spinning and Wool Work to bridge the Seasonal Gap:
Even with the sudden and welcome arrival of this winter-spring snow, I’ve found the transitional time between February and May to be a difficult bridge to cross.  Do you feel the same way about this time of year?

This year, I’ve turned to my spinning wheel more and more, as an anchor that moors me to the gentle but tangible threads of Hereness and Nowness, as I traverse this liminal time of Not-Quite-Thereness.

The familiar sounds of the spinning wheel and shuttle, flying through the air, join the even more familiar sensation of wool flowing through hands and feet beating an ancient rhythm on the pedals. They whirl and pull and dance, a primal dance my hands have never had to learn. A love language my whole body has always somehow known. 

This act of communing with wool and wheel and watching fiber form before my eyes, connects me to generations upon generations of women before me, with a startling immediacy and an inescapable awareness that the past is living and breathing right here in the present, as I turn wool into thread. 

When crossing turbulent waters, whether its managing the shifting cycles of nature, or the changing seasons of my own personal life, it’s spinning and wool that anchors me to the wisdom that all storms do pass. 

That no matter how perilous the crossing may seem, in nature as in Life,  one season does indeed turn fully into another, that the dregs of winter will pass away and that spring will arrive in its all embracing fullness. 

That no matter what comes, through snow and spring, I will be here, at my wheel, dancing wool into thread, breathing love into life. 

Quote taken from George Orwell’s essay “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad”.