New, And Still Winter
a devotional for the week of Epiphany
Welcome back, dear readers, and happy 2023!
I missed you all on my break last week, but I hope that you found pockets of joy and blessing in your holiday observances, Christmas or otherwise!
As I’m coming up on my one-year anniversary here on Substack (what?!), I have been considering a few tweaks to implement to make the experience here that much better for the coming year and beyond. I beg your patience as I figure out the best way to give those tweaks a try, and I’ll be able to give you a clearer picture of what that will look like in the coming week or so. Stay tuned!
But for now, let’s get back to what we’re here for!
Thank you for joining us!
Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from a few weeks ago:
On the last discussion thread, TBollen wrote this incredible insight:
I'm not sure that age brings wisdom, but it does bring perspective. As an annoyingly optimistic person by nature, I've had to come to grips this Christmas season with the reality that a surprising number of our friends (us included) are facing a season of persistent emotional challenges. This has indeed brought to the fore what you called "darker aspects of human experience." Our faith never drives us to despair, but hopefully makes us more prayerful as we put trust to the test. Faith also gives us the maturity to think through the cognitive dissonance of Christian living and embrace the irreducible tension between God's promise and our earthly experience. As a result I'm toying around with a notion that's new for me, even though it's probably old hat for many: "Life is sad, and that's okay." Still working through the implications.
This was so beautifully said, TBollen! Thank you for sharing this timely reminder with us! (And as an annoyingly optimistic person, myself, I can relate.)
If you want a chance to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!
Now, on with this week’s devotional…
in the cave of my skull my mind waits, listening to the whisper of rain and cozy against the cold. she sleeps through the clamor, cries for the birth of new habits invitations to new journeys; why do they sound like sweet lies? she sleeps, cushioned in darkness and waits for a dawn that will arrive in due time.
Something kind of interesting happened to me just before New Year’s Eve: I had a post on Instagram go quietly viral.
I say quietly viral because it didn’t get seen by millions or people or anything, but it did spread much, much further afield than anything I’ve ever done before. I don’t attribute this to any particular genius of mine. I think the message was just a perfect blend of timely and generous that I could never have planned for, and people felt the need to share it.
The gist? It’s okay if the “new year” doesn’t feel like the “new year” to you.
This is something I have felt for a long, long time and only recently felt able to verbalize. January is a terrible month to treat like the new anything. It’s still dark, cold, and dismal. My body knows that it’s still winter. The last thing she wants (or needs, to be fair) is a juice cleanse and a new workout routine.
Instead, my body and brain crave to be treated like a hibernating animal: still resting. Still focusing on surviving the dark. I am soft and sleepy. Tasks require persuasion, work feels like an uphill climb.
But of course it does.
No matter what the calendar says, it’s still winter.
Consider this, as you walk through these first days and weeks of a “new year”: this is not automatically the time to embark on new things just because businesses and social media influencers say so. Your body is still in survival mode, no matter how much you try to convince it otherwise.
Perhaps a better resolution might be: I will embrace winter as a time to incubate. To ferment. To germinate. To do the soft, silent, quiet, essential growing below the surface.
This, so that some day soon I will emerge, ready.
Thank you for reading!
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Well that was the most illuminating thing I’ve read in a while! Whew! How obvious yet profound. Thanks, S.E. for being so sensible and reminding us that we don’t need to follow the status quo.
There is a lot of food for thought in this post. I hope to return to it later after I've gone through a mental rest and Digest process. I've often thought that my seasonal affective disorder is really a mild form of a need to hibernate, mentally and physically.