What can I write in the winter?

When the words are stuck.

What can I write when the words are stuck behind a barrage of fears and worries?

How do you look for the beautiful, the wonderful, the wildness when all you can think of is the shadows and the smallness of this corner?

Perhaps that is the wildness. The whole. The everything. The fruit and the rot. The soaring sky and the broken bird.

We turn from decay and deny the winter, but it is the turning of the wheel. How can we stop it? We sometimes wish only to exist in the full heart of summer, to forget that winter can even exist in our world.

I am learning to winter. To speak my winter, with the decaying, the absence, the fear of endings. I am learning to walk this path in the dark amongst the trees, tripping over roots, stumbling across frozen streams.

I am learning that we cannot overcome the darkness. We cannot fix it for it is not a thing to be fixed. It is a thing to be embraced. We cannot be our fullest selves without the shadows.

I am learning that, to have courage, we must learn to step into the dark nights and see the wonder that is there. Who knows what we will find? Perhaps new things, beautiful things, bright skies and singing birds, blossoming trees and endless oceans.

This is what I can write when my words are stuck behind that barrage. The shape, the colours of the night, the smells of the winter, and the sounds of my fears as I journey to find the spring, to remember my courage.

It turns out there’s always something to say.

Photo by Arnold Dogelis on Unsplash