I’ve been feeling less depressed this winter than I have in recent years.
Admittedly, every year I think I’m going to avoid my cyclical winter blues, and then February 1 hits like a freight train. I know that pattern well enough not to trust early optimism. Still, this year does feel different, and not because I’ve resolved anything. It feels different because the weather matches what my body remembers.
I grew up in the upper Midwest and winter made its mark on my bones in a very specific way. Long stretches of cold. Snow that stayed. A season that did not tease or soften itself to make life easier. Winter was not dramatic. It felt endless. It shaped posture, pacing, appetite, and sleep. It trained the body to endure without commentary.
The last several winters where I live haven’t done that. And I don’t just mean this in terms of climate charts or snowfall totals. I mean it somatically. Spiritually. There are embodied effects of climate change, not just material ones.
Climate grief does not only show up for me as fear of the future or despair about the planet. It shows up as disorientation in the present. My nervous system notices when a season stops behaving like itself. My body, shaped by winter, does not know how to settle when winter never fully arrives.
This is a quieter grief than we usually name. It doesn’t announce itself as mourning. It shows up as restlessness, anxiety, low-grade depression, a sense that nothing quite lands. When the rhythms that trained me disappear, my body keeps reaching for cues that never come.
Even though I’ve always complained about winter, I’ve come to realize over the last several years without a proper one that my body needs it. This year, for the first time in a while, winter is wintering the way my body remembers. My seasonal depression feels more manageable.
Winter resets something deep and nonverbal within me. There is grief in realizing how much that reset has been missing. And there is relief that it is here, at least this year.
It helps, of course, that I no longer live in the city. There is real access to outdoor winter life here, and that matters. But this, too, is rhythm. When there is no snow, there is no snowshoeing. No microspikes. No cross-country skiing. (I’m too chicken for downhill.)
A winter without winter practices leaves my body braced with nowhere to go. Grief lives in this loss of ordinary bodily outlets, in the disappearance of practices that once metabolized cold and darkness.
This year, those channels are open again, and the relief is resonant.
I don’t take it for granted. I genuinely believe our experiences of a true winter—of a recognizable, intact season—are numbered. That knowledge sharpens attention. It makes winter feel less like an obstacle and more like a teacher whose time with us may be ending. There is grief in that recognition.
When the Feast Ends
The winter solstice is generous. It is communal. It burns bright against the cold and asks us to gather, feast, mark survival, and honor continuity. But no fire like that can be sustained. In that way, it is a goodbye party, before we go our separate ways into the dark.
After the solstice, the season tightens. The blaze recedes. What remains is heat that must be managed carefully. Winter stops performing and settles into its real work.
Outside, the world becomes stark and stoic—white ice and snow, black lines of trees, repetition without ornament. There is nothing lush about it. Nothing inviting. Just conditions that must be met as they are. We brace. We endure. We accept. Not heroically. Quietly. Because resistance wastes energy, and winter does not care about our aspirations.
In a destabilized climate, this phase often never arrives. Or it arrives incompletely. The feast ends, but the discipline doesn’t follow. The body is left suspended—celebration without consolidation, anticipation without containment. That suspension has a cost.
Stoicism as Seasonal Intelligence
Winter’s stoicism is not a moral stance. It is an accurate response to reality. It asks not for toughness, but for honesty. What does this moment actually require? What movements are necessary, and which are habit masquerading as need?
Nordic winter culture understood this long before it was articulated as philosophy. It was not belief-driven at first; it was household-driven. How to keep heat, food, and attention from dissipating before spring. Restraint was not aestheticized. It was practical. Meals repeated. Clothing rotated minimally. Social demands lowered. Emotional restraint functioned less as repression than as energy conservation. Winter shaped behavior long before it shaped stories.
Midwestern Swedish households carried this intelligence forward without naming it. The casseroles, the soups, the early nights, the acceptance of snow as normal rather than catastrophic—all of it trained bodies to endure without drama. Even as religious language faded, the seasonal posture remained. Winter was not a problem to solve. It was a condition to live inside. My body learned that logic early, even when my mind resisted it.
Climate grief shows up for me when that intelligence can no longer be practiced. When restraint feels arbitrary instead of seasonal. When endurance is demanded without a corresponding container. Winter strips away the fantasy that we can live at full speed year-round without cost. Climate change strips away the conditions that once taught us how to slow down.
This is the season to simplify the outer life deliberately. To do less. Buy less. Cook less. Decide less. Not as virtue. As seasonal intelligence. Every added obligation draws from a finite reserve of attention, warmth, and nervous system capacity. In this narrow passage of the year, we learn to ask whether the cost is worth it. Often, it isn’t.
The Inner World Softens
While the external world hardens, the inner world follows a different rule.
Internally, we are not asked to brace. We are allowed to soften. We turn toward the slumbering terrain of the psyche, toward that half-lit space between sleep and waking where thoughts are still images and meaning has not yet been forced into shape. This is not a season for clarity or proclamation. It is a season for incubation.
Dreams surface. Moods drift. Associations appear without explanation. The work here is not interpretation, but patience.
Cultures that knew winter understood this division of labor instinctively. If the body is asked to endure, the psyche must be allowed to wander. If the household is kept spare, the inner world can afford to be rich. You cannot demand resilience and imagination from the same place at the same time. One must hold while the other rests.
Climate grief interferes here too. When seasons no longer signal rest, the psyche is asked to keep producing meaning without pause. Incubation is replaced by rumination. Darkness becomes anxiety instead of gestation.
Endurance First, Meaning Later
This is where modern life consistently fails us. We ask the body to withstand instability and exhaustion while demanding constant output from the inner world.
Winter refuses that arrangement. It insists on sequence. Endure first. Incubate quietly. Speak later.
The danger in this season is not stagnation. It is interference—filling the silence too quickly, naming things before they are ready, mistaking restlessness for insight. The psyche needs dark the way seeds do. When climate change short-circuits winter, it short-circuits that darkness as well.
Outside, the palette reduces to white and black, light and absence. Inside, we tend the fire.
No longer the solstice blaze. Not yet the first flickers of spring. Something steadier. Smaller. Sustainable. Candles lit at the same hour each night. A lamp left on. Soup kept warm in the instant pot. The glow that says we intend to make it through.
In Swedish households, fire was never about spectacle. It was about continuity. Enough light to see. Enough heat to last. The goal was not indulgence, but survival. That ethic still makes sense to me. The fire I tend now is not symbolic. It is the same question asked in a different century: how do we make it to spring without burning through what we need?
The task is simple and exacting: keep warmth consistent, nourishment plain, light reliable. Keep the fire alive without exhausting it. This is how households survived winter long before modern infrastructure. It is also how inner life survives. You do not exhaust yourself chasing illumination. You keep the ember alive and trust that it knows when to grow.
What Holds
This stretch of time does not ask for transformation. It asks for restraint. There are no vows here. No resolutions. No declarations of who we will become.
Roots deepen in the dark. By the time Imbolc arrives, what has been incubating will not announce itself loudly. It will simply be able to receive a little more light.
This season teaches a difficult skill: how to live with less motion on the outside so the inner world can move freely without spilling everywhere. How to be firm without becoming brittle. How to soften without collapsing. How to tend the fire for sustainability, not spectacle.
When I notice that my depression feels more manageable this year, I don’t attribute it to insight or improvement. I attribute it to alignment. To winter behaving like winter again. To my body recognizing the conditions and responding as it was shaped to respond.
That recognition carries grief with it—the grief of knowing how fragile this alignment has become, how provisional even a “normal” winter is now is. But it also carries clarity. Loss teaches what matters.
By the time the first small flame of spring appears, nothing dramatic will have happened. But something essential will have held. And that is necessary.
In spiritual solidarity,
🧿Constant Craving ✨