Dear Friend,
Where I live, on the 45th parallel, tucked in the forest of the coastal range of Oregon (USA), this time of year is dark for a good part of the day. Trees, shrubs, fallen leaves, and the ground, all glisten with moisture. Everything is wet. Moss and lichen thrive as if summer’s light and heat never happened. The river is wider, higher, and faster, receiving all that the saturated terrain cannot reserve, now a rushing uproar of singing white water with the occasional bobbing loose log headed for the ocean.
Frost, wind, lightning and thunder are the leading characters of this season. The formidable elk leave trails of scat and deep, hoof-made holes as they traipse up and down the slopes looking for food like the young growth that some developing trees and bushes are trying to produce out of their otherwise skeletal structures. It’s a matter of survival.
In the darkness, life continues. The rhythm of this season has its own expression.
My habit for this time of year is to reflect on successes, transformations, lost opportunities, and failures. Arguably a helpful exercise from year to year if one is both self-compassionate and honest. Taking the four together gives a holistic view and can be a helpful way to understand the flow of our life. A failure can inspire a transformation and a lost opportunity in one area can open access in another. My mom taught me this way of holding good fortune and difficulty together. I’ve learned from her that small adjustments in perspective make for good practice and inspires life-long perseverance as a way of being in the world.
This year has provided enough challenges to help me live the practice. I am guilty of spending too much energy on worries like the shifting state of politics, global humanitarian crises, increasing natural disasters, and misinformation. Thankfully, I’ve sought out and found voices, mostly historians, naturalists, poets, and philosophers, who make sense of things as they relate to the long scope of history.
Nature offers perspective too. There are short and long term cycles of death and renewal. There are hot summers and bitingly cold winters. The flora, fauna, and fungi can adapt until they can’t. Then something moves in to take its place. Any observation of a tree’s rings can tell the history of drought, fire, and abundance. Freezing and thawing changes and reveals new landscapes. I’m not suggesting that any extremes are normal, only that they are happening.
It can feel overwhelming– what we witness, sense, and anticipate. What can we do?
Small gestures can relieve our despair. As author Clarissa Pinkola Estés notes in her essay, “We Were Made for These Times” (2024), “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” The invitation is to take a look around your “part of the world” and see what needs mending. Dedicate part of your home (balcony or yard) to growing food, plant native flowers and trees for pollinators, provide water for birds and critters who move on paths around your home, and take a walk with a friend. Go outside. All acts of kindness have a ripple effect.
And don’t forget to create. Observe, translate, transcribe, and document all that you witness. Start a journal, write a song, or any other project that helps you shape and understand the patterns, movements, successes, transformations, lost opportunities, and failures of this life. This is one way to ride the inevitable waves.
I wish you a happy winter solstice as an encouraging marker that spring and summer approach in the not too distant future. Until then, enjoy what the winter brings.
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