This week we approach the Winter Solstice. In fact, today is the day before, the shortest day of the year. For many animals and wildlife, it begins a time of dormancy and hibernation. It’s a time where animals are in complete harmony with their environment. They let go into it, grow furrier coats, lower their body temperatures, and conserve metabolic energy. They productively use waste, breathe more slowly, and are very creative in how they spend their resources. Conversely, humans go to great lengths to control our environment during the winter months; turning on the heat, making a fire, bundling up in warm clothes, or heading to warmer climes.
During the last six weeks, I’ve gained weight, been doing a great deal of eating, slacking off on my yoga practice and the healthy routine I set for myself. I try new beauty products at the expense of self-care. I have zero motivation to take photos of myself or post them. I don’t want to engage in social media and I can’t make myself do it. I’ve declined every invitation to events, preferring to remain at home and focus on tasks that make it more our own and more comfortable. I’m a social media person who does not want to be social. I’ve been very hard on myself about these behaviors. I don’t like how I look. I won’t even allow the grace of giving myself a break because my mother is dying.
The work I thought I had done when it comes to idealized standards of beauty, self-acceptance, how I define “productive” and good health is coming into the stillness and telling me you are not done yet. Not related to my age, they have been issues in all periods of my life, starting in adolescence. While insight may bloom for a time through therapy, or writing, other non-verbal modes of expression, or becoming an Accidental Icon, after periods of dormancy, these issues tend to re-emerge at different points in our lives in a new form that we must observe, cultivate and tend to again. We are constructed by the times we live through and so the deconstructing process can never end. In each phase of the human lifespan, these concerns are always the same, but different. They will keep appearing to become new growth during times we stop long enough to let the shoots poke through the ground and not get trampled by our ever forward-moving feet,
