Reflecting on the beauty of the fallow season...

Taken on a stroll down our street one winter afternoon. It was uncharacteristically gray that day.

When the ice of winter holds the house in its rigid grip,

when curtains are drawn early

against that vast frozen waste of landscape,

almost like a hibernating hedgehog

I relish the security of being withdrawn from that

summer ferment that is long since past

Then is the time for reappraisal: to spread out,

limp and receptive, and let garden thoughts rise to the surface.

They emerge from some deep source of stillness

which the very fact of winter has released.

- Mirabel Osler, "A Gentle Plea for Chaos"

Cloud-clogged sky. Dirty, icy slush. Soggy shoes. Damp chill. Cold drafts. Early darkness. Gloomy weather, gloomy mood. For more than a decade, that was how I described a dreaded season.

This is the first time in memory that I have truly savored winter. The quiet monochromatic stillness of the barren landscape, the temperature drops that hurry us indoors to woolly cocoons and steaming mugs, the snow and ice that make us rethink our usual speed on the highway - these natural elements of the season are reflected in our lives too. Or, rather, they could be.

This has been a time of deceleration for me. On the surface, I appear to have achieved little. And yet there is a churning beneath the fallow ground. What will spring forth from the death of long-held dreams and the painful tilling of rocky soil? In the uncertainty of waiting, I cling to the hope that nature's paradox bears truth for my journey too. Death before life. New things from the discarded. Birth out of barrenness.