Winter is the season that invites us, if we pay attention, to rest, reflect and renew ourselves. 

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, as we approach the very end of the year, we have already experienced the shortest day and the longest night. The Celts believed that the light always followed the dark. As one year ends, we are now already in that period following the darkest of nights when we make the slow, gentle ascent towards the return of the light, the new growth and beginnings that will come in Spring. It is a good time to be gentle with ourselves, to take things slowly, to gather up blankets and candles and relax indoors, or bundle ourselves up against the cold and go for slow walks in nature.

Sometimes we need to recharge by doing nothing very much and live for a time in that void between harvest and spring, letting our field go fallow for a time before we are ready to bloom and fruit again.  We need to find a place to rest in the soil and gestate like the seeds, to draw inward like the trees.  But this void is not death, it is alive with possibility. There is the bud at the end of a branch. The tip of a snowdrop rising from the cold ground. And all that is alive and hidden from our human sight below ground. From this in between state, from this apparent nothingness, life will emerge.

It’s a time of year when I really enjoy the sky and watching the changes it undergoes throughout the day, to celebrate the light of the moon on an atmospheric night. Taking time out to pause and watch the sun rise through a window or to walk out at dusk. Taking photographs and sharing them with my family in our WhatsApp group called Sky is one way we share our nature based connections with each other as a family. Small but important rituals that mean something to our little tribe.

As we rest in the embrace of the dark and the Winter, this time is the perfect opportunity to reflect on and honour the year that’s been, even (perhaps especially) if it has been a turbulent year. You might like to do the same and write from these reflective prompts:

What have you enjoyed this year?

What has been difficult this year?

What are the practices that sustain you as you go through the seasons of the year, the seasons of life? What do you want to carry over into next year?

How will you honour Winter and it’s call to rest this year?