It’s that time of year when the days grow shorter, the nights longer, and the temperatures colder. I have never really been a fan of winter growing up. I don’t enjoy being cold, having it get dark at 4 p.m., and looking at trees that are barren and bare. I never saw beauty in winter. For me, winter was just a season to bear and get through until the bright green of Spring began to blossom.

Reading the book “Wintering” The Power of Rest and Retreat During Difficult Times” by Katherine May completely changed my view of winter. May writes, “I hope we can learn and acknowledge that wintering is an inevitable thing that will happen to all of us and that we can see other people’s suffering with much more compassion.” In her book, May talks about her own inevitable winter that she went through and how she used the lessons of Nature to give her body the rest and the retreat it needed.

As someone who feels an incredibly strong connection to and with Mother Nature, I was struck by the ways in which May related her own winter to the season. She spoke of the power of resting and retreating similar to the animals that spend winter hibernating. She spoke of finding beauty in that which is barren while also knowing that it won’t be barren forever. She spoke of the need to surrender to one’s own winter and to adapt to it. She spoke of the profound lessons she learned from allowing herself to experience her own winter and to accept that trying to be like everyone else is what breaks our spirit.

I am in my own winter and I found her words echoing many of my own feelings and desires. I have a deep desire right now to rest and retreat from the noise of the world. To cocoon myself and focus on the things, people, and places that feed my soul. I have a desire to sit in silence and reflect. To surrender to what my body and spirit are telling me instead of running and distracting. I am slowly learning to find beauty in my own winter when the landscape of my life right now often feels barren and not nearly full enough. I am learning to find comfort and joy in the stillness wintering brings.

If you find yourself feeling like you need to retreat, rest, and connect with yourself in these days, weeks, and months ahead as the uncertainty in our world grows ever more real, know that you are not alone. Listen to your body and allow yourself to have your very own winter. Your winter won’t last forever and there will be beauty among and within the barren spaces of your life. You will come out of your winter with profound lessons that you can’t learn any other way accept through confronting the grief, sadness, fear, anger, etc that you carry with you. Don’t run from your winter. Open the door, let it come in, sit by the fire with it, and make it your friend. Spring will always come but first we have to winter.

As Katherine May so eloquently writes, “Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”