Plants sleep, after a fashion. The sun sits too low in the sky, the ground grows hard and cold, and snow blankets bare twigs that protrude from the trunk. They grow at their creeping pace skyward, imperceptible until spring, when they scramble back toward the heavens to become more than they were the year before.
That is us sometimes. We need a moment. We take a step back. We grow slowly in the things we want to achieve, and then we have bursts of creativity—our own spring. I don’t mean this as many experience it, as a kind of manic thing. I mean it in the perfectly normal sense that we cannot sprint all the time. Sometimes, we have to walk, take a moment to grow at a sustainable pace before we burst forward again.
These last three months for me have coincided with actual winter and have been a creative winter—a moment to look at my garden of activities and take stock. What has worked, and what has not? What do I need to do differently? What do I need to lean into and do more of? Hibernation, as a time of slower progress, is not a negative thing. It is not, not progress—unless we never return to the garden. But if we do, then these pauses can be our own brief winters before the spring.
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