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Hey {{First Name | there}},
This is my first “real” winter in twelve years.
I lived in Arizona and New Mexico for the last stretch. And people there will tell you — you do get seasons. They're real and they're beautiful. But winter in the Southwest still gives you full-sun days, playgrounds in January, hikes year-round. The daylight barely shifts when you're that much closer to the equator. An hour, maybe two. You dress a little differently and keep going.
Coming back to the Midwest this fall, I felt the full weight of what I'd been missing — or maybe avoiding. The darkness arriving at 4:30. The cold that makes you think twice before going outside. The way everything seemed to close down and go quiet in ways I hadn't fully reckoned with.
Seeking consolation, I kept looking at the forest behind our house.
Not intentionally at first, and then very much on purpose. I'd fold laundry at the bay window and just watch. Stand with my coffee. Let my eyes adjust to the grey.
This is that forest.
It isn't pretty, exactly. Grey sky. Grey-brown branches. Tangles of bramble and thorn. Several fallen trunks along the ravine bank. And so many trees bent sideways, leaning at strange angles, growing in shapes I don't fully understand. I've stood there wondering: was it wind? The slope of the bank? Is something wrong with them?
I've seen other forests where everything grows straight up. I don't know what happened to ours. I ask the trees sometimes. I'm still waiting for an answer.
What I didn't expect was what the bare forest would give me in return.
When the leaves are gone, you can see in. Really see. Deep into the ravine, across to the other bank, through the tangle that hides everything in summer. The very thing that made it feel barren was what made it legible.
And in that bareness, I started spotting things.
Deer at all hours — a mama and her two babies (now nearly full size) we've been watching since they were spotted fawns in June, practicing their sprinting across the yard with awkward legs. Squirrels chasing each other in impossible loops, up one trunk and down another, moving so fast along routes they clearly know by heart. A coyote crossing the edge of the yard. At night, an owl — consistent and close, whoo whoo, whoo whoo whoo. Last night I was sleeping in my two-year-old's room and it woke me up, like it was just outside the glass.
And this morning: a fox.
It had been on my list. An informal, hopeful list of things I suspected or heard were out there. There it was across the ravine, on the far bank of the stream. Unmistakable orange-red fur. A tail so full it nearly mimicked the body, like two foxes trotting in line.
I smiled. It moved through the trees and disappeared.
That fox crossed the ravine all winter long, I bet, whether or not I was watching. What made this morning different wasn't that it finally appeared. It was that I was paying attention. Quietly, consistently, long enough to catch the movement when it came.
We go through seasons. Seasons of full expression and visible growth, and seasons that look — from the outside, sometimes from the inside too — like not much is happening.
But something is always moving in there.
When your creativity feels quiet, it isn't gone. It's waiting for conditions to change, or healing from something, or simply living its life on the other side of the ravine. And if you want proof of it, you don't have to conjure it. You just have to be willing to look long enough to catch the movement.
If it’s felt like a bare season for you, what if the bareness is exactly what allows you to see what’s moving? What can you sit with, watch for, notice now — before the seasons change? Before life fills back up with the fresh buzz and opportunity that comes with spring, and the view closes in again?
And if you’ve found the movement, how can you nourish it so that it takes root and is strong enough to not get overcrowded when the spring growth comes back?
— Jennifer
P.S. Make the Money Math Math starts Saturday, March 14.
Creative Foresight subscribers get $47 off with code 47OFF
When you register, you'll get an email with form to fill out before we meet. Completing it is all the prep you need to do before we begin.
— Jennifer
