Grief Equinox
Leaving Winter
It’s impossible to understand spring, until you know winter.
I realize now that I never understood spring. Not in nearly a half-century of
springs. It’s impossible to understand spring, until you know winter. I
I moved from the coast to the mountains after my Love died. Mountain
winters are different, to be sure. The snow piles deep and silent long past the
season when I would have been cooking from my garden in years past. But I
am different too.
How many internal winters have I skipped in my life?
External winters used to be something I pushed through, endured, and resisted.
In winter, I stiffened against the cold and the dark, relieved when coastal
wildflowers began blooming again by late January. My winters were short and
mild, allowing barely a breath between releasing and grasping, again and
again.
How many internal winters have I skipped in my life?
Winter is the place beyond the fear.
Until grief, I never knew that winter is the place beyond the fear. It is the place where reality is what it is. It is the place of nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to be. This is the state itself I lived afraid of long before Don’s illness and death.
I tried to push through life with action instead of stillness and resistance instead of acceptance. I didn’t want to learn what winter had to teach.
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.
The transformative moment comes when so much identity is stripped away that the ego can no longer shelter the fear, and when the rawness of I AM sits exposed.
Mark Nepo writes, “All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.”
That space of nothing becomes everything.
When the internal winter is long enough, dark enough; when the soul is willing enough; when it feels like there is nothing left to do but surrender to the void; In that moment of embrace, that space of nothing becomes everything.
There is no more fear of loss.
There is no more clinging memories or expectation.
There is no more striving.
There is no more fight against what is.
That is the gift of winter.
Swaying quietly in the space between being and doing there is a fullness.
That is the gift of winter.
Winter came later.
The winter of grief didn’t come for me when Don was diagnosed with cancer, during the months of chemotherapy or witnessing the violence of the illness and the treatment. It didn’t even come with his death.
That was autumn. The letting go. Winter came later.
Winter is the pause between exhale and inhale.
When the letting go is strong enough, struggle ceases, sits twitching like a dying animal, finally grows still.
Winter is the pause between exhale and inhale that is neither loss nor receiving, neither letting go nor reaching forward. In modern life, most of us exist on an endless metaphorical hamster wheel, trying to run fast enough to escape that pause, numb our feelings, and escape pain before we can find our center within it.
Winter isn’t sadness. It is the silence that happens afterward.
Winter isn’t sadness. It is the silence that happens afterward, the moment of surrender when peace comes again, when the next intake of air is no longer frantic and grasping, beginning another cycle of hyperventilation. And in the emptiness, as if for the first time, there is fullness.
This is the fullness that opens into the audacious boldness of tulips unfolding when snow is in the forecast, of cherry blossoms braving wind and frost, of birds coming home to to build and nest on a promise of hope. This is spring. Let it be spring.
What has winter made possible for you? How are you opening into spring?