Seasons.

Winter, and learning to stay right where we are.

February has arrived and I can almost taste the change in the air. Although I’m sitting here looking out at a fresh layer of snow covering the farm, the second month of the year reminds me that even though it’s still a long ways away, winter will end. They’re long, Swedish winters. Real long. It gets dark and cold by the end of October, and although we like to tell ourselves that spring begins by the end of March (hey, it’s spring equinox!) we spend all of April waiting for the last frost to pass even though we know there are surprise snowfalls yet to come and that real spring won’t arrive until the beginning of May. It’s a strangely masochistic game we play, us Swedes, spending months on end longing for light and warmth in one of the darkest, coldest places on earth.

After a decade and a half in the Caribbean, I find winter to be a gorgeous season that I absolutely adore. I love late fall and enjoy the slow transition toward shorter days and longer nights - after all the extroverted energy of summer and early autumn, I long to light the first fire of the season and wait for the first snow with giddy anticipation. November gets a bad rap here - it’s cold, and dark, but in many parts of the country we don’t get enough snow for it to feel like proper winter. In the cities gray sludge cover the roads, and without Christmas on our doorstep it can feel dreary. There is something about the darkness creeping in that I just love though; it feels like a permission slip to slow down. Lighting candles, cooking soup, snuggling up with a book and a cup of tea… These things might feel cliché or like something we make ourselves enjoy so that we can stand the dark season, but I think there is something primal calling for us to just sit down and be quiet. Surrendering to it is an exhale, a relief. Of course by the time December comes around we’re wrapped up in the Christmas magic with everything it brings… And then the festivities start and they’re over just as quickly as they began. Suddenly, it’s January. A new chapter. It’s a weird thing we’re doing, starting a brand new year in the middle of winter. I love setting intentions and starting new chapters, as I’m sure you know (ok fine, I get a little bit over the top withe excitement about new years intentions!), but a part of me struggles with the “start anew”-energy when nothing is actually starting anew in nature. I go outside, and the land is still asleep. Everything is quiet. Everyone is resting. It reminds me I should be resting, too.

January is a tricky month for many of us, and I wonder if it has more to do with our struggle to align our inner rhythm with the outer rhythm of nature than we think. After so many months of winter, no matter how beautiful it’s been, there is a part of me that just feels done. I want the world to thaw! I need sunshine on my face! And my fingers are itching for planting season to begin. I ordered a pallet of soil in some desperate attempt to will winter to be over the other day and its lying outside of one of our barns now, frozen solid. I want to start new projects, so I walk the land looking for things to do - should we build a duck house here? Maybe we could renovate this old root cellar? How about new garden beds over there? - but the ground is rock hard and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. It’s winter still, and I really should take a cue from nature and just rest.

This morning! Note the frozen bags of soil in front of the garden shed…

Winter calls for us to let go. To turn inward, to get quiet, to be still. Winter shows us how essential it is to gather our energy below ground - it urges us to look within and resource ourselves on the deepest level. Winter isn’t something we have to live through to finally get to spring; it is thanks to winter that spring can exist! It is now that the roots are busy drawing the nutrients they need into their core. A trillion bugs and microbes work to alchemise the soil, making it fertile and ready for seeds to take root and sprout. Decay and death is as essential to the cycle of life as growth and birth. For the new to take root, the old must rot and decompose. All of life begins in that dark place beneath the surface. And just like nature, we have our own cycles of movement and rest, creation and surrender, expansion and contraction.

So I ask myself; what is my relationship with rest in this season of my life? Do I deserve rest even if I haven’t accomplished anything? Can I rest because it’s my birthright, because its in my nature to do so?

Sometimes I can sense an expectation of eternal summer within me; the expectation of consistent output and never-ending creation. I still exist in a space where I feel best when I have worked hard to accomplish something, and like I’m less deserving when I’m not. But what if the magic is less in the manifestation of it all, and more in the stillness that lies beneath? What if resting is a wonder, too? The more I contemplate the essence of this season, the more I understand the primal urge that brought me back to the long winters of my childhood.

I have spent a lot of time lately thinking about my incessant need for new projects - the part of me that stays in continuous motion regardless of what’s happening in my inner and outer world. Even so, I have changed my pace a lot! I have some ways to go but I can sense my inner rhythm slowly aligning more and more with nature. Life does look different today compared to what it did a few years ago; I don’t feel that internal pressure urging me to run faster anymore and I’ve put down the need to succeed in the eyes of the world. I’ve traded business ventures for garden planning, zoom meetings for permaculture studies, photoshoots for slow days at home with the kids. Now, there is always soup simmering on the stove. In my old life nothing ever simmered, and it was too hot out for soup. Everything we ate was put together quickly or taken to go. My days are softer, gentler, simpler now; gone are the days when I felt a near-constant sense of stress and like I couldn’t keep up no matter how hard I tried. I wonder if winter helped bring me here.

A glorious moment of rest

Living in Aruba, there was never a change in seasons that whispered; “go slow”. Every month was the same: sunshine, warm winds, barely a cloud in the sky. The only thing that ever slowed me down back then was illness or injury, and even then I’d resist it. Whenever we tell people we moved to Sweden from the ABC islands (a popular vacation destination for Swedes) their response is always the same. “Why!?” And to that, I always answer the same thing: I missed the seasons. There are many reasons to why we moved, of course (mold, burnout, in need of a change) but the thing that called me most truly was the seasons. I missed cold water, deep forests, the feeling of spring arriving after a long winter. There is nothing quite like it. All in all, I was just longing to go home.

So now here I am; in the middle of winter, doing the same thing that every person in Sweden does in mid February: analyze the weather incessantly, and debate whether or not spring, actually, is on its way.

Well… I think it is! February has arrived. The darkest months of the year have officially passed and a different energy has started surrounding us altogether. Walking Lea to the bus, I no longer have to wear a headlamp (goodbye, 9am sunrise!). I hear actual birds chirping in the morning. We have two more hours of daylight compared to a month ago. When the sunlight touches my face, there is a warmth to it. It’s faint, but I can feel it. There is plenty of winter ahead of us, but February reminds me that more light will come. So I guess my work over the coming months is simply to stay right where I am. How can I honor the heart of the winter season while its still here? What part of my inner world is calling for attention? What am I ready to put down, to leave behind? Where can I soften?

Those frozen bags of soil aren’t going to thaw anytime soon. I might as well stay by the fire. There is soup on the stove, after all.

X

Rachel