The winter brings us into a state of reflection naturally, as we find it necessary to live at a slower, more deliberate pace.  Allowing long nights and short days to guide our own cycles we find our eating and hydration habits change as we spend more time contemplating inwardly.  Our need for external resources is never more apparent then now as we use what we have and wait for warmer weather to restock.  Our skills, tools and resources are so needed to aid us in living with the northern elements.  This period we live through now is due to our accumulated resource base; envisioned, collected, harvested and stored within the warmer periods of the year in preparation for now.

It is humbling how our own inner ebb and flow of energy reflects the seasons and the cycles of nature.  As we spend our lives inside now, we have time to check in, introspect and reflect.  As I look over, all of the journals that I wrote throughout this last year, I track myself and relive the experiences I was inspired to write about, revealing the cycles that grew throughout the seasons of my own life.  I have come to know the cycles within myself as I experience the cycles of life around me. It seems the journey through the seasons and many winters that I have been keeping track of now, have turned both the inner and the outer perspectives into one.  Fusing the cycles into one seamless trail that allows me to see my own evolution.  I can see where I got distracted and why.  Where I was most effective with my efforts and how to be more efficient next time around. 

As a naturalist and tracker I have come to know the winter as a time of clarity and purification.  Where all life is tested, wherein the strategies of survival are tried not so much by fire, but by lack there of.  Amidst the wild things, big and small, new opportunities that never existed before in warmer months are created now in the winterland. New habitat and within, niches to fill are made available and the thirst to fill them is made evident. Native flora and fauna, who have grown within the local ecosystems, as part of them, over decades and centuries, reveal their strategies or original instructions as they leave trails to follow throughout the cycles of the seasons, the years and generations.  All the while their life strategy, grown locally and in balance and accord with the ebb and flow of other life forms surrounding them show us, inspire within us and help us be aware of the balance that can be found within and without.

Anticipation, tension and stress turn to action, ease and grace as we learn to live in accord with the ebb and flow of life in the habitats we find ourselves in. Some find winter unbearable; cooped-up, dreaming of warmer times, cursing the cold and paleness of their skin. I have considered such things and felt the life seeping out of me as I gave energy to the unbearable winds of winter.

In reliving the events which have allowed me to come to know winter as bleak- and unfit for 21^st century humans.  I realize that the very idea has come from a community of people who, not long ago were living closer to the equator, where their ancestors before them had lived for generations and have since migrated north.  They have inner memories of warmer climates and have yet to find a new story of survival that will give meaning and purpose to the bleakness and grey of the north in winter.  Though in winter we have the time to gaze out the window and especially on the coldest of days, beyond the dirty window of perception a chickadee plays with titmice and nuthatches.  A meadow vole tunneling is heard by the owl through the snow.  Deer feeding among the cedar swamp are trailed by wolves. While the black bear, raccoon and red squirrels sleep the porcupine prunes branch tips to fall for the rabbits.

What are the ways in which people have enabled themselves to live among the wintery North?  How do people find solace in the bleak and grey, in some places black as night?  How do they empower this way of life?  Today people migrate South to Florida, Cuba or Mexico or simply dream about it through T.V.   It is easy to numb oneself from Jack's icy grip, with the vices of the day - yet when I look back, way back and study my roots I have found that my ancestors come from North of Scotland in a time well before the telegram, where tropical influence came only in dreamtime and on the trade winds.  I realized that in empathizing with the equatorial  born person whom has evolved in the warmer climate of the world, that that was not my idea, or ideal. I love the north, I feel stronger here and upon looking back, I find that I am consistently inspired and intrigued to know that my ancestors embraced the solitude of the north.  They found meaning and purpose living amidst the forces that shaped and guided their existence in the north.  The more I track my ancestors in these cold times of the year, when I sit by the fire and read of their inspirational adventures and stories, I find myself needing to know more about the natural wild habitat that I live in, here in the North Eastern Woodlands.

My time spent inside has empowered my need to be outside and has inspired me to learn to blend, balance and fit into this habitat of the north as the wise ones of the wild woods have learned to do, even to this day.  The cultural tools created through revealing the symmetry of inner and outer worlds in relation to the place we call home is what our stories are for.  I am so thankful for Story time....