Every winter brings a certain bleakness with its shorter days and its colder temperatures. It is a time when long dark nights are often accompanied by stillness, lethargy and dormancy. Winter’s attributes affect human behavior. For example, there are times during each winter when I feel like I am going to be done in. Sometimes these are just fleeting thoughts of despondency, but at other times I have found myself too deeply submerged into weeks and weeks of the darkness called winter.

Winter is a time to allow the soil to rest, as we prepare for the new growing season ahead. It is also the time to look into the darkness called our self, and examine our roots and the ground we are growing in.

Here are a few things that I usually go through in the dark night of winter:

Questions about my self worth

Dealing with desires to ‘give it all up’

Discouragement, such as asking questions like, “What’s the point?”

In past years I had a hard time seeing how to build something positive out of winter’s doldrums. In recent years, however, I have realized that just as it is good to contemplate Death every day, it is also beneficial to use questions like these to mine deeper into our root system. I find that as I go deeper and deeper, I discover more and more substance. This discovery can yield a confidence and determination to center on and in the deeper and more fundamental aspects of life, including the root drivers that are determining our reason for Being here in the first place.

Mining of this nature doesn’t come without a price, and one price is standing up for what we discover to be True as we travel beyond the shafts and tunnels of Time, and enter into the vast cavern of the Eternal.

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