Magestic Wolf

The lone wolf teaches us about independence and the bravery it takes to go out on your own.

We can call on the wolf spirit animal to help us summon the strength deep inside of us to guide us into making the decision that is right for our own lives and our individual spiritual paths. 

Embrace your winter!

Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

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Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeing rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or life event such as bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or our partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.

Yet, it’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless, unvarying high season. But life’s not like that. Emotionally, we’re prone to stifling summers and low, dark winters, to sudden drops in temperature, to light and shade. Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we were able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter. Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us. Somewhere along the line, we would screw up. Winter would quietly roll in.

[...]

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. The perform extra-ordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is the time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

It’s one of the most important choices you’ll ever make.

"a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider." In the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered."

"I recognized winter," she writes. "I greeted it and let it in...Nature shows that survival is a practice."

Wintering, she says, is a way to get through tough times by chilling, hibernating, healing, re-grouping. "Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential,"

“When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” —Eckhart.

Whenever there is silence around you, listen to it. Stillness if the practice of being present. But you can’t be present unless you’re accepting and surrendering to the moment. Most suffering comes from resisting to what is. You either resist and struggle or you surrender and accept. One thing brings you closer to who you are and one brings you closer to losing yourself completely. It’s the active practice of recognizing you are not the voice in your head, you are just aware of it. That voice, that compulsive stream of labeling and comparing is not who you are. That voice wants to pull you out of the moment, analyze the past, and worry about the future. If you follow that voice too long you identify with it and your suffering will just spiral.

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"The Strength in Our Scars" by Bianca Sparacino is a poignant collection of reflections, poetry, and insights that explores themes of healing, resilience, and personal growth. Through her evocative writing, Sparacino addresses the struggles of emotional pain, the journey toward self-acceptance, and the importance of embracing one's scars—both physical and emotional. Here are ten key lessons and insights from the book:

She’s in between worlds right now.

A part of her is leaving.

But it’s not like before.

She’s holding space this time.

Not sweating it, but breathing beyond her skin.

She’s good.

She’s even shape-shifting.

The raven.

The owl.

She’s unafraid of the bird’s-eye view.

And unlike all those other times, she isn’t scared of the unknown.

She’s present and neither timid nor bold.

It feels beautiful like the song of a blackbird.

And powerful like the rumble of an avalanche.”~

~Tanya Markul

art: Ingrid Tusell