inward

It’s New Year’s Day, and something more: incredibly enough, today is also my seven year, seven month, and seven days sobriety anniversary! Now if that is not the perfect way to launch a new year, I do not know what is. 

Christmas is over at last, and despite it being my favorite holiday, like every year I am immensely relieved that it’s behind us. I need all the fuss to be over. Maybe it happens every winter, but this is only the second I’ve noticed it: a going-inward, one that is of the body and the spirit as well, a physiological urge to step back, stay in, get still. Not just a yearning for silence, but a knowing: this is what’s needed. 

I write about this a lot, about my new connection to nature. I’m not a nature writer per se, just a woman whose beloved died, and I didn’t want to cry in front of my daughter all the time, so I started walking up the driveway to cry where she couldn’t hear me, and then I discovered that walking up and down the driveway was incredibly soothing. So I did it a lot. And after some weeks went by, I realized it wasn’t just the walking that soothed me, it was being outside under the sun and the trees. After some months, I realized I was only doing as well as I was, mentally, because of my walking. So I made it a practice, a self-care baseline: every day, no matter what, I will walk outside. Always once, usually twice. And as I tended to my mental health this way, I witnessed the progression of the seasons, I discovered the guidance of nature, and I was gobsmacked to realize, hey, this feels good. This feels like, I dunno, the way I was created to live. In tune with the seasons instead of oblivious. Immersed in my natural environment instead of removed. 

We live in a world that has forgotten the listening part, that no longer teaches us to move in rhythm with the seasons. And I like this world too! I like screens, and cars, and having the knowledge base of all humanity available to be searched in an instant whenever I wonder what that South American lake with the floating islands is called or what exactly is Tom Hanks’ net worth. I like staying up past sunset in the glow of artificial lights, I like my pedestal fan in the summertime and my electric heater in winter, I like taking a hot shower whenever I want—I am not someone who aspires to build my straw-bale home into the side of a hill and drink milk from my own goats as I preserve the summer’s harvest in my own mason jars. I like things to be easy.
 
Of course, it’s all about moderation, right? Because the notion of following the seasons has been transformational for me. Simply to notice, and not through the window, but by being in it, feeling it on my skin. This summer it occurred to me that in New Hampshire there is NO SUCH THING AS AN IDEAL TIME OF YEAR—winter is frigid, summer you get eaten by bugs, and somehow this was freeing, to realize I didn’t need to idealize one time of year over another. They’re ALL uncomfortable. And at the same time, they’re all beautiful, staggeringly so. This is what I have discovered, that the chill of autumn is refreshing when you’re protected with hat and gloves, that the flooding of springtime can be accommodated with a good pair of rubber boots—in short, there is no weather that can’t be enjoyed as long as you have appropriate gear. 

And that the seasons are a map. When you get here, go all out. When you get there, pause. That’s what winter is to me now, the pause. My urge to turn inward kicks in mid-November, as the cold sharpens and the light fades and the animals disappear. For weeks I saw porcupines gorging themselves in the tree branches, and now they have disappeared. There was no white Christmas this year, and the turkeys and squirrels still crunch persistently through the dry leaves. Everyone knows it’s time to get quiet and settle in. Wait out the winter. Not because it’s some season of frigid punishment, but because it’s a reset, a chance to curl up in a small, still place and rest. 
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I always dreaded the endurance of this season. But it’s the restfulness of winter I notice now, the pause. Enough with the busy-busy, the rush-rush; my body says, no, that’s for the long bright days, and this is the slow dark season. The quiet is waiting for me. The inward urge is my self-invitation: be still, turn within, and know me better. ​