The Quiet Gift of Winter

Winter has always carried a poetry I can feel in my bones. I found a beautiful reflection online that felt like it spoke directly to my spirit. As an introvert — someone who can easily feel adrift in the noise and materialism of the season — it is refreshing to remember that winter was never meant to be about frenzy and glitter.

Winter, in its truest form, invites us to slow down. To walk alone beneath a quiet sky or hike through the woods hand-in-hand with someone we love, listening to the hush of the world as it settles into itself.

Once, long ago, the winter solstice was celebrated not with excess, but with reverence. It was understood as a sacred period of descent and rest — a time to draw inward, into our homes, into ourselves, to gather the lessons of the year now folding to a close.

Like the creatures burrowing deep into the earth, we too were meant to hibernate: to rest our tired bodies, to unburden our minds, to simply be for a while.

But our modern world has taught us to resist this natural rhythm. We are urged to drown the quiet in flashing lights, endless lists, shopping, rushing, spending, overworking, overdoing. We are taught that winter is hard — when perhaps it is only asking something different of us.

Because beneath the cold, beneath the loneliness that sometimes arises in the stillness, winter is kind. She does not clamor for attention or force us to be anything other than what we are .She simply points us — in her gentle, soft way — back home to ourselves.

Winter invites us to a sacred pause: to sit by a real or imagined fire, to forgive ourselves for what has passed, to embrace the darkness not with fear, but with love. To say goodbye to the old year with grace and gratitude.

"Winter takes away the distractions, the buzz, and presents us with the perfect time to rest and withdraw into a womb-like love, bringing fire and light to our hearths."

And then, when the time is right —as surely as the earth turns back toward the sun —we, too, will rise again. Like seeds buried deep beneath the frozen soil, we will stretch toward the light, and dance once more in the warmth of a new beginning.

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#SylvieAbate