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I’m cold. I’m sitting here in this cold cement library on this chilly spring day.
It’s spring, yes, but it’s a cloudy and grey Berlin at 3°C. My body is anticipating the end of this long winter. I’m ready for warmth, expansion, and lightness. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, spring is in no rush.
It’s been a heavy winter, to say the least. My first winter in such cold and dark circumstances. Days with seven hours of dim daylight, the sun stuck behind walls of clouds. Colors other than black and white are hard to come by. As if God drapes a no-color filter over the whole city.
Everything starts to look the same. I imagine if you’d look from above we would look like those rats running scientific experiments in grey mazes, in a ten by ten hoary room, lit by the most unnatural and awful lighting one could find.
Not so easy for a west-coast kid accustomed to at least 300 days of sunlight a year. I find myself stopping everything I’m doing when the sun peaks out from the dense colorless blanket that clothes the city. I’m reminded of lizards sunbathing. This all makes sense now.
These days are slowly turning into memory, though. As the seasons shift I realize how much German winter has taught me a lot about being with the seasons. Even using them to my advantage.
I’m emerging from my hibernation with new insights, inspirations, and clarity. I have a clearer path forward. Winter has given me a chance to feel my fear of expansion, and my doubts. I have become more resilient. I am less affected by fear. More prepared and open for expansion. I’m trusting in my process. Trusting in my gifts.
I guess this is what winter does. It builds trust in the process. “It builds character.” But it has an end. The harsh times we experience internally also don’t last forever. Winter is only preparing you for a hot and expansive season on the other end of the spectrum. So that you have the space for new qualities to take on form in you and in your life.
I feel my body welcoming the freshness of a new season. A new chapter. Waiting for its thirst to be quenched, my skin anticipates drinking the sun’s golden rays and warming my inner world. Melting the ice of inactivity and dormancy. My body is ready to move, play, and interact with the world.
Spring starts the manifestation process of what became clear during winter. The winter fire shed light on what needs to be done and what needs to be discontinued. The transition to summer leaves space for us to walk in the direction of the new coordinates winter has given us. By summer, intentions become manifestations. A lived experience of what was only internal in winter.
It’s important that we don’t override this process. If we spend too much time trying to get away from the cold hard winter, we may overlook processes that bring us clarity. Then we enter spring with confusion and the daze of winter pulling the strings at our back.
Summer turns into chaos. We’re unable to contain the expansion that comes, so our energy spills disorderly to many different projects, activities, and desires. We leave summer with an energetic hangover. Looking for the next hit, we hold onto our experience as we enter autumn. We’re left barren and exhausted the next winter.
Just like everything in life, the seasons teach us. Their lessons come down to accepting how things are. As a culture, we are incessant about living in ways that promote getting to better times. Getting “there.”
Through this, we often miss what the “bad times” – the dark and cold winters – have to teach us. We end up re-creating experiences that we have already lost fulfillment in or feel misaligned in. It may be clear to us what the pattern is. We may even know the script word-for-word.
It’s harder to change the script. I believe that the mind makes it seem impossible because change necessitates a metaphoric plunge into the depths of winter. We need to say yes to discomfort. If we fear that discomfort, we create a story that conceals the fear.
We quite literally might run to Bali for the beach and sun, creating a whole narrative to convince ourselves that it’s the best idea. (Don’t ask me… Okay, I definitely thought about it… These winters are no joke I tell you).
We fear entering the barren landscape, which is unknown and often will require a death of some sort. Of course, It’s fine to be scared. And it’s also great to go to Bali. But when we’re not aware that we are acting from fear because we suppress it, we may experience undesirable symptoms in our life. For example, repeating our past. Another downfall, we don’t fully choose because our fear makes the decision.
So what can be said is that winter may be tough. It may be a bitter unwelcomed monster, but maybe that’s what’s needed to move beyond some of the ways our life feels stuck. Maybe the shadow that winter casts gives us a chance to clear out what’s dead, old, and ready for transformation. We emerge into spring with more space to host life and what it desires from us.
Expansion is great, but only when we have the capacity to hold it. Oftentimes, it seems expansion comes fast and with too much force because we haven’t created the space for it.
Then we’re caught holding onto the rocket ship rather than being the pilot of it. We want to have a choice in how we’re expanding. Expansion for expansion’s sake is a disaster that will leave us burnt out.
If life is seemingly moving too fast for us it may be interesting to ask what we’re holding onto. What in us seemingly moves slower than life? Is that a present, updated, and creative process or is it something gone obsolete?
Winter is the time for questions like these when the energy is naturally moving internally. It’s a good time to question what the hell we’re doing. Is it still working for us? Are we choosing it? And if there’s something better, how would that look?
Spring comes as play. Test, prototype, and enjoy the new creativity that comes with the slowly expanding energy. Discover the ways that new inspiration wants to come through.
Explore what feels scary because it’s new. Notice how old things, that still work, can ground you when you feel scattered or disoriented. Open to the natural disorientation that spring creates in us too – just like the weather can turn from sunny to snow, to rainy, back to sunny, all in one hour. Make it a play. An adventure.
We are so attached to things working out that we sometimes don’t give a chance to this exploratory phase. When we have the freedom to be wrong or fail, then our inspiration will land in the way it wants to. It’s only manifested through us anyway.
If you think you are the one doing something, you will most likely get stuck at some point. Life is the orchestrator of how new things come in. We simply need to tune ourselves to its rhythm.
During spring, we might find ourselves out of resonance or slipping into old ways. This is all a part of the play. Embrace it. Summer comes and things begin to root deep in the soil. That’s why trial and error in spring is so important. There’s more potential for things to land when we have explored enough.
Life is taking care of the rooting process anyway, we just need to plant and water the seeds in the best way. A part of this is understanding and coming to terms with the fact that some things will not work out.
All of this is extremely obvious, and maybe even feels redundant to say, when we look. However, again, we are so often trying to get out of our circumstances that we miss opportunities that are self-evident. The weather patterns are simply a reminder for us. A mirror. A map that can help us navigate our internal landscape.
That also means that our internal experience seasons can come and go beyond the timelines we know them. We may experience a blistering winter for several years before we hear the birds start to chirp and the flowers bloom. Even in a day, we can spin a full seasonal cycle. It’s good to remember the model of nature in these times so we aren’t so quick to judge ourselves.
Everything is already here for us. We don’t have to go anywhere to find something out. We just need to have the courage and openness to look. We can turn our life into one great adventure when we approach it in this way. We will always discover new things.
Participate in the play, moving from cycle to cycle with awareness of what they reveal to you. Enjoy the gift of this great mystery in the bright, joyous, and vibrant times as well as the frozen, desolate, and gloomy ones. Never be finished because it’s impossible to be anyway.