“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun. 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, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an out-sider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a 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, [but…h]owever 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.” – Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times How have you experienced the Somewhere Else-ness of winter, yourself? Have there been seasons in your story where you felt outside in the cold on some level? Are you there now, mirroring the northern landscape in some way? What do you sense your soul and God inviting you to in those seasons (in this season)?

Posted by Jamie Bonilla at 2023-02-28 14:30:00 UTC