It’s really strange lately, I’ve begun to feel the seasons shifting more than usual, and not just outside my window either, but inside myself. The kids are growing up and stepping into their own lives with their own responsibilities, the beard grows a little whiter, bones are creaking bit more, and the world feels turbulent in ways I can’t control. Even in my work in the tech industry, where everything seems to move at light speed, I’m beginning to feel my age. Each new tool and each new trend seems to spin the wheel faster, and I find myself running like a hamster just to keep up.
I keep asking myself: am I running out of time? There are still things I want to do, dreams I thought I’d have time to reach. Yet the more I chase, the more the wheel turns without me.
And maybe that’s why the changes in my family hit differently now. My daughter moved out earlier this year… she went searching for a better world out there as a young adults do, and I truly hope she finds it, though a part of me fears she’ll meet the same harshness I’ve come to know. For a while, she stopped talking to me, and the silence was its own kind of winter. But lately she’s started visiting again. I find myself excited to make her dinner again like I used to, as a small ritual of warmth, a way to remind both of us that love doesn’t disappear; it just waits for the right season to return.
And maybe that’s why the real winter feels different this year, too. I’ve honestly never really found it beautiful. It always felt like a kind of death, like the color has been stripped from the world, life is tucked away beneath the soil or hiding in warm dens. Even we humans retreat, closing ourselves off from the cold and the dark. The world goes quiet, and in that stillness, I feel my solitude most sharply.
But in Druidry, I’m reminded that everything is cyclical, that even though things may change, and that people will come and go from our lives… that it’s all okay. The wheel keeps turning. Connections fray and reweave. Things die and are born again, sometimes better, sometimes not… and that, too, is part of the pattern.
And even in the quietest season, there are small mercies. The comfort of a dark winter night when the moon shines bright and unfiltered through bare branches, glinting off the snow. The smell of hearth fires rising from neighbors’ chimneys. The hush of the world holding its breath before the light returns.
I will admit, though, I’m dreading the coming winter. I always do. I don’t want to let go of autumn’s golden light, or the warmth that still lingers in the air. Or admit that the beauty of summer really is over. But maybe that’s what this time of life teaches: to hold beauty lightly, knowing it will always come around again in another form. There is beauty in winter, too, if you look hard enough. It’s in the stillness, in the stark honesty of the landscape, in the quiet that allows new dreams to root.
And maybe that’s the secret the season keeps, that even in the coldest moments, we are being made ready for what comes next. Maybe that’s the gift of growing older: learning to find beauty in the pause. To understand that stillness doesn’t mean the end, but renewal in disguise. Winter isn’t a void; it’s a sacred resting place, reminding us that even in darkness, life is waiting to begin again.
If you’re dreading your own winter, either in life, spirit, or in heart, may you find comfort in knowing that the light always returns, and you are never as alone as the silence makes you feel.
