Originally published on Unstruck Soundbites Substack. Subscribe to interact and receive weekly posts in your inbox.

I’ve been remiss to restart Soundbites, caught between winter’s call for hibernation and the pull to stay connected and birth a new year. How do we hibernate without hiding? I’d love your help if you’ve figured it out and your company in the journey of exploring. From the book that introduced me to the verb of winter:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; we* don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that we lived in the summer. We prepare. We adapt. We perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get us through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

— Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (*I’ve changed “they” to “we”)

These words hit differently this year, as I replace “them” with “we” to include myself. I’m done pretending that I can generate and sustain the same energy throughout winter as I do in summer. Where I’m at, it’s COLD. And I don’t like it. It stings. Yet, I love the feeling of warmth hugging a frozen tickle and bundling up in fluffy, fuzzy, furry fashionables. I don’t like missing out on shared experiences with friends and family. Yet, I love the simplicity of only needing to check in with myself for a spell. Like in comedy, it’s the contrast that brings delight.

But I haven’t yet found the delight in the contrast of wanting to rest—to spend more time closing out my old year—against the pull of starting strong and the burden of being a coach wrapped up in the hype of “new year, new you” action. I’ve been wronging everything about New Year’s—the timing, traditions, pop culture. Until a friend challenged me: What if this is the perfect time to celebrate? How does that impact how we celebrate?

1. From the calendar’s story, when we wrote that winter is not the death but the birth of a new year, we wrote that winter is also the womb, a gestational season, and its conception. This makes now a fitting time to impregnate myself with the futures I will birth in due time—shifting my focus from the action of giving birth RIGHT NOW to concepting. And just like that (finger snap!) … intentions, mottos, resolutions make different sense.
2. As for how to celebrate, I’m giving myself permission to honor my own pace inside of the Human Race. I know I need a grizzly bear’s den of space to keep reflecting, exploring, and experimenting as I create what will later be birthed, knowing that not everything conceived will survive beyond this season.

The delight, I’m discovering, lives in the juxtaposition of hibernating while connecting through the sharing of unfinished discoveries. And my practice is to give myself lots of space—several Soundbites if you will—to let intentions root deeply in the dark, quiet soil of winter before asking them to bloom.

As you winter, what delights are waiting for you in the space between hibernating & connecting?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments or my inbox. Cheers to however you’ve chosen to conceive and ring in your new year!

Published on Unstruck Soundbites Substack. Photo by USGS.

Fear of the unknown and inevitable is universal and wise. It signals that we’re paying attention. That we care about being alive. To honor our fear is to honor our aliveness. To honor our fear is to listen for its lessons. It was never meant to stop us, but to wake up—alert us to the wild wonder that we’re alive—simultaneously existing and becoming.

This week’s quick yet spacious read ^[1] and inspired practices comes from a poem commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran ^[2]

“It is said that before entering the sea
a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled
from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
And in front of her,
she sees an ocean so vast,
that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.”

—FEAR, KHALIL GIBRAN

When I think of my fears, my first instinct is typically to avoid, hide, dissolve. And then I think of the river becoming the ocean, surrendering to gravity and the inevitable. I imagine myself holding my breath until I realize that I belong here—I can breathe here. It’s in this belonging that I can let go of what was and retain what always will be inside of what’s new. It’s in this belonging that I don’t have to disappear into my fear and can expand beyond. This kind of belonging and becoming isn’t one-and-done. (No one steps into the same river twice, after all.) It’s a practice, that like all practices, find power in repetition.

A Grounding Practice: River Meeting Ocean

• Stand and imagine yourself as a river
• Feel your “headwaters” at the crown of your head
• Slowly move your attention as you “flow” downward through your body
  • Notice where you feel contraction or constriction, resistance or fear
  • Notice where you feel expansion
• As you end at your feet, notice what it feels like to meet the “ocean” and then become the ocean as you extend energetic roots into the earth, lengthen in your energetic tether to the sky, and feel into your “3D” presence

Questions for Reflection

1. What wisdom lives in the place where your resistance meets your longing?

2. What’s your ocean—your future that you’re resisting and becoming?

Footnotes

1. One of the many reasons I love songs and poetry is for their power to stop time—I can get lost in their lines, feeling a memory long forgotten, seeking to soak in their magical ability to shift my mood, a mystery begging me to linger. And when I linger, they extend an invitation, an offering, a question—along with a reminder that I’m not alone. I call these spacious reads for the space they create for me to simply be with myself. Contrast that with the art and media I consume to escape being with myself. ︎
2. While commonly attributed to Khalil Gibran, I wasn’t able to find a primary source of this poem. I did find a reference to a possible source by another author, proposing that it evolved (and was channeled) through multiple authors. ︎