I forgot how cold winter can be.

Icy temperatures and bristling winds—there is something to be said for its ability to shut me down at a moment’s notice and take me to a darker place where my heart is unopened—remaining closed until Spring. A sign on my chest stating “Call Again.”

My body remains dormant as well.

Uninspired to the touch and the heat that is the fire within. I search and I search for inspiration but none comes and I whisper for it in my dreams, but the whisper does not seem loud enough for my own psyche to hear. My higher self diminishes as the warmth of the summer and even the fall is forgotten and I no longer can grasp onto the memory of what once was—those sandy beaches and tans and hot half-nakedness weaving themselves into the day-to-day.

I am lost in the winter.

I hibernate from that which I have always known of love and inspiration and wonder.

Reaching me is like a long distance call in the 1960’s: costly, quick and contained.

No time for frivolity or abandon.

Love evades me as well—the frigid air turns my heart cold and I close the gap between what can embrace me and what remains dormant. I feel the reach of those around me looking for even the slightest whisper of warmth as their outstretched fingers linger near me, ignored.

I wait for the hibernation to end and refuse to sleep sluggishly through the dark days waiting for the solstice and hope for spring as each minute of light promises inspiration and love and beginnings anew. Where living in a vacation place creates a sense of “here’s what you can’t have” as the ocean turns an icy cold and freezes against all odds of the scientific evidence to the contrary.

Salt water heals but where is the salt to keep the deep freeze at bay?

Each day ticks by in time and I know that come March I will be refreshed and relieved that the days are longer and the slush and the mud hold promises to a heat that will eventually arrive and inspire. A heat that reignites a passion that will carry me through the seasons once again.

So I try and I aim for the success of getting through this wintry mix of ice and cold and dormancy.

I remind myself that while hibernation is key to the success of some species it is not the key to the success of me. I need to search and wonder and wait for the ecstasy that will arrive if I open long enough to let it through.

Warmth will find me in other ways.

Ways in which the slow burn and boil of the heat that I have saved from summer will find its way out once again. It will arrive first as a secret and then as a boom. My heart bursting as its re-ignition can no longer be tamed. I will no longer creep through the dark days but skate through them—being my own bloom of heat and love and desire.

And just in time (before the winter winds and ice get me completely) I will emerge. Awaiting a new season and a promise of a new day.

Spring will be here soon enough.

And with it, the ecstasy.

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Editor: Catherine Monkman

Photo: timo_w2s/Flickr