Stillness is not stagnancy

A review and some thoughts on winter

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Like many this time of year is when I look back at the past years and years. It is a time of review, release, realignment. I also look forward and consider what I want to do or how I want to be different, which next layer of healing I want or need to focus on, how I want to shift the ways I am in relationship with myself, my chosen family and friends, the land, my children, my ancestors and guides, the cosmos.

For me, 2025 has been a year of unexpected change. Someone from my past, who I thought was long gone, returned. My oldest child graduated high school, while my younger finished elementary school. We moved homes, the process of which ate up our whole summer. My relationships, and the ways I am in and do relatioship, has been morphing. My professional work is moving into its next interation and evolution. I began writing more easily and consistently again, after years of struggling to find words or even wanting to put any down. I have connected with the land more intentionally and deeply, including the yard of our new home. I have been expanding my spiritual practices and finding comfort and peace with my ancestors and guides as well as honing my clair- senses and settling into the next layers of my own emodiment work and inner knowing. I have been shown over and over, to trust in the timing of the Universe while continuing to do the work that needs to doing on my end. I have felt loved and seen and appreciated so intensely it was overwhelming (in a good way) at times. I’ve recognized some more of my own harmful patterns and been able to put in the intentional work of change (and have seen some results). In many ways, so much good and beauty has happened over this last 12 months.

It hasn’t been all rainbows and unicorns, though. There has been finanacial hardship and stress. The realization (and rage and grief that followed) that certain people in my life don’t actually hold the same values around kindness, generosity, and honesty that I do (and perhaps never have). I had Covid for several weeks, followed by a depression more intense and terrifying than anything I had experienced before. I have been witness to people I care about spiralling and self-harming, knowing I can only be there to support them when they choose to do the work of change, but until then there is the sadness and frustration of being witness. I have felt disregarded, disrespected, undervalued and misunderstood. Not to mention the continued genocides across the globe, the continued destruction of our forests, rivers, and oceans for the profit of a few, and the continued, intensifying general struggle of trying to simply continue exisiting under all the systems of harm (while trying to break them down and build something new, better, and more humane and equatable).

In other words, it’s been a year.

I believe we can all make similar lists to mine, of the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful, the neutral and mundane. Because that is life in general, the constant ebb and flow of light and darkness, of peace and war, of love and indifference. Or at least, this is life under the systems that continually work at isolating and controlling us, continually attempt (and often succeed) at making us complicit in and compliant to the harm they cause each of us and the planet.

And with that said, I do feel this last year has brought a lot shedding, a lot of release, a lot of clarity to seeing what actually is and who people actually are. It has been painful for some. It has been affirming for some. It has created space for the intense and immense change to come, individually and collectively. There has been a collective releasing and unveiling, bringing clarity to even more around the systems that cause harm and the people who benefit most from them.

As we move through the last couple days of the 2025 Gregorian Calendar year, the next few months of winter leading to spring, the darkness slowly and quietly becoming more light, we settle into the post-holiday stillness of winter. We will hear and read more and more about how this time of year is about rest, quiet, not doing. I have a different take on winter.