dead of winter.

Exhale.

Grounding. 

I’m standing in a white field after sending my friends on a plane to a city, that in another life, I would have gone home to. But instead I’m still here. Awaiting my own departure day, watching my dog romp around, kick up the snow, with the Minneapolis skyline in the distance.

It is in this city, I can feel myself coming back to my roots.

The bite of the air on your cheeks, so cold it takes your breath away. The hospitality you can receive from only Norhterners. The Uber ride in a F-150. The Flying C window decals and Michigan hats. The hug of a childhood friend. 

It’s familiar enough to ground me but enough of a steady pulse, rising and falling, into a deeper knowing. I left it all, but it never left me.

I can feel my core re-settling. Reconfiguring to a new way of being with the knowing of where I came from and what I’m built for. Knowing to my core I was built for the dead of winter and the journey ahead.

The death that comes with winter. 

We grow in the cycles and they are never ending.

We need winter to remind us to come back. Come back to our roots. Come back to what’s familiar. Come back to the comfort.

We must sit and feel into what this life is both reminding and asking of us.

We ask what can be released so that we may only have courage and strength when we are asked to shed the layers and step out again.

When the sun comes out, our skin will warm and all the while we remain soft, open, lighter.

We will bloom again. No matter what season we are being asked to walk in, to grow in, to move in, to breathe in, to let go in. 

Even in the dead of winter there are days when the sun shines and the air cuts a little softer. It’s in these days we do what we can to remind ourselves to keep going. It’s in these days I get out with my dog. We cross a bridge and find a park and play in the snow. I watch him live his best damn life and am encouraged to do the same.

It’s in these moments we feel spirit and receive the gifts that come with the never ending cycles.

Release and renewal.

Inhale.

Expansion.

Happy Winter Solstice.