What Does Winter Mean to You?

meandering thoughts from moments when, even though nature is quiet, it's still speaking volumes

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Trackless. Pristine. Silent. Adventure…

…awaits.

In a mountain space, in a silent snow drift, the whole world grows enormously vast and then converges into a vacuum pinpoint sparking the origin story of my very next breath. Frost calligraphy on atmospheric parchment, invisible ink universally translated.

I think I have never felt more an anonymous cog in a universal wheel than when drawing a silent breath on a winter mountain.

Snowflakes drift gently from blanket clouds drawn close around a snug cocoon defined by a warm fire glow.

Slow. Calm. Quiet.

Hibernation. Restoration. Preparation.

It’s a full sort of peace. So full you almost can’t bear it, but you also can’t see it or hear it. It’s as though the entire hum of natural life has drawn up tight for one brimming moment before the dam bursts.

It’s a hard-won peace. It takes a minute to earn the deep peace of winter and enter its unique domain. It takes sitting with the howling storms as the winds lash out their raging tantrums, forcing trees into kneeling submission beneath a furious sky. It takes drawing the tempest inside and sitting with it. It takes certainty that peace is what comes after. It’s only possible to grasp it if you can begin to believe in it before you can begin to see it.

Winter peace is full because it comes after…and full because of what comes after, still.

There once was a man who suddenly stumbled upon the entire truth of life in a single winter branch. ‘This branch appears entirely dead. And yet, spring’s life is already inside it, every future leaf and blossom, just waiting to emerge. This is life. This is God.’¹

Winter spreads a landscape all asleep, all dormant, all subtly underscoring new life pulsing right there, beneath the bark, beneath the snow, beneath the stillness of it all.

Hope and certainty are inversely related. As hope approaches, and clarity resolves, and certainty increases - well, hope becomes less relevant, doesn’t it? Hope evaporates upon the arrival of that happy day when it dissolves into present experience. We don’t really miss it, of course, in all the excitement.

And yet…

Isn’t it something to feel the very first stirring of a new hope deep in your soul?

Hope is most fierce when stretched to furthest tension, a whisper breath from breaking. The pull of distant hope, first realized, is molecular in strength, and the words to describe it are flash-frozen in your throat at the same time that they are acid-etched into the fiber of your being.

This hope, this earliest awareness that there is anything at all to hope for out there beyond the trackless horizon, is the very essence of winter’s prelude to spring.

I learned to be alone in a snowy winter forest. And that I was never alone. That a snow crystal is an inexhaustible source of awe. That streams navigate winter as cheerful prisoners locked in crystal palaces. That joyful shouts and absolute silence are the same language. And that bonds of friendship formed with winter birds are strongest of all :)

Like a pet name and your special song, it’s the silly, simple moments in nature that speak to the depth of your personal connection. A cold brew stashed in a cold drift holds an entire lifetime of fondness in my winter romance.

No words needed. Winter and I just look at each other and smile. Silent, alive, hopeful. Adventure…awaits.

What does winter mean, to you?

1. “During that winter, upon seeing a tree stripped of its leaves and considering that within a little time the leaves would be renewed and after that the flowers and fruit appear, Brother Lawrence received a high view of the Providence and Power of God which has never since been effaced from his soul.” https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5657/pg5657-images.html