Mortal Matters: Winter’s Wisdom
By Sara Engram
I took a long drive this week, meandering along winding country roads.
It was a cold, clear day, and the landscape was serenely still.
In wooded areas, a dusting of leftover snow dressed up the ground, hiding the fallen leaves decomposing underneath.
Mid-winter is like that. It often looks as if nothing is happening.
Trees stand bare, and fields seem empty. The land is stripped down to essentials.
But underground, the work is real – even “riotous,” as the Sufi poet Rumi described it.
Roots deepen and spread. Microbes are busy.
Fungi weave their networks through the soil, trading nutrients, carrying messages, breaking down what was alive last summer so something else can live.
Going Deep
Life doesn’t disappear in winter. It goes deep.
That’s important to remember in a culture that only prizes growth when it’s visible — when something is blooming, producing, posting, expanding.
It’s also important to remember that always pushing for growth can wear us down.
We’re trained to distrust seasons that don’t show obvious progress. Unless we can share positive data, we worry we’re falling behind.
But winter tells a different story. Even – maybe especially – in those bleak times when the ground seems to shift under our feet.
Sometimes our lives mirror this season. Work feels heavy. Loss feels raw. Change arrives uninvited.
This can be its own version of winter – a feeling that echoes the moment when warm jackets, roaring fireplaces, and hot beverages lose their charm.
We passed the Solstice. Light is returning. But the darkness still feels heavy.
The Grace of Pulling Back
Maybe that’s why a winter landscape rewards our attention.
A hearty dose of nature reminds us that what looks still and frozen can be alive with preparation.
It shows us that rest is not a waste of time — it’s an essential beat in the rhythm of life.
Winter, on the calendar and in our lives, brings invisible labor.
The emotional composting and recalibrations.
The slow sorting of grief, exhaustion, disappointment, or change, within ourselves or out in the world.
And yet, without this invisible work, nothing healthy grows.
In his book, “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures,” Merlin Sheldrake writes about the mycelial networks we are discovering underground.
These vast fungal systems are changing how scientists think about connection and intelligence in nature.
Mycelial networks support entire ecosystems below ground and out of sight. That, too, feels like winter wisdom.
Winter allows something worn out to decompose so it can nourish something new. It’s a reminder that much of our own important work also happens out of public view:
- Caregiving
- Grieving
- Forgiving
- Letting go of old assumptions
Like winter, this kind of work shows us that finite lives require limits and that expansion is not the only goal.
In winter, trees pull their sap inward. Animals move around less.
Nature’s wisdom teaches that this is a time to conserve energy, not squander it.
For many of us, this boundary-setting comes not by choice but by necessity: aging bodies, caregiving responsibilities, grief that drains our reserves, or just the accumulated wear of years lived attentively.
Winter shows us how to pull back.
It simplifies the landscape, and what’s left stands out more clearly.
There’s relief in that – it eases the pressure to keep every door open, to remain endlessly flexible and always available.
As the days pass, and as time itself feels more precious, we begin to crave depth over breadth.
We want fewer conversations that go nowhere.
We accept fewer commitments out of habit.
And certainly fewer distractions masquerading as opportunities.
Letting the Fields Lie Fallow
Winter shows us that it’s more important to inhabit our lives than to optimize them. It reminds us to pay attention to the wisdom all around us:
The wisdom in letting the fields rest.
The wisdom in allowing parts of our own lives to lie fallow. Not abandoned or wasted, but deliberately unplanted for a season.
This doesn’t mean we should withdraw from life or romanticize hardship. Because soon, winter will end.
Those latent buds are now busy preparing blooms. Before long, we’ll take delight in seeing them everywhere.
And, I hope, we’ll remember that the world becomes riotously beautiful because of what happened underground, the patient, unseen work that we cannot rush through.
So if this season finds you quieter, slower, less outwardly productive than you think you should be, consider another possibility:
You may not be stuck. You may be wintering.
And winter, for all its restraint, has always known how to prepare the ground.
You can find more by Sara Engram at SaraEngram.Substack.com
