San Diego is a Mediterranean climate. Long dry summers and short wet winters are the capstone qualities. Eighty percent of the time the weather is mild. Indeed, we also experience Santa Ana winds – periods where hot dry winds hammer in from the deserts in the east, making everything crackle with static, causing tremendous instability.
But the short wet winters are my favorite. Perhaps because the rain is rare it causes tremendous appreciation. It feels like actual weather – the kind you read about in books.
Southern California is experiencing it right now. Gobs of rain have fallen over the last three weeks because of atmospheric rivers causing flooding, sinkholes, and mudslides.
This is our winter.
We used to run a certified organic farm. That is when I learned about real food, nourishment, and living deeply with the seasons.
During our short wet winters, the air feels different, smells rise from the soil, eucalyptus leaves shimmer, and nettles and nasturtiums materialize.
The vegetables that grew during the winter were brawny and tough.
Beets the size of your fist, vigorously red, with dirt clutching to the tiny tendrils, their greens lively as a drag queen’s hair. Kale, resplendent, and lacey as a Queen’s cape. Juicy and sweet cream-colored turnips, bitter dandelion greens, their leaves serrated like pinking shears, magenta cabbages, quizzical cauliflower – these vegetables triple dog dared you.
Growing in the valley, these veggies braced freezing nights and soared at sunrise, ridiculing the cold and long dark nights. During the day they expanded like satellite dishes to consume every watt of luminosity, every radiant speck of energy to form their complicated and complex structures.
Did you catch that?
Do you realize that’s what you do too?
Do you understand this is your Winter’s Work?
It’s a cold world out there right now. There are fewer daylight hours which means there are more hours of darkness; more time for dreaming. Come inside, collect yourself, cuddle up and get cozy.
What’s your dream?
The dream is what nourishes your soul, that’s the soul’s food.
Fantasy, imagination, play, and creativity are all ways the soul wants to expand.
This is your retreat exercise for today. Let’s see if you will play along.
Get your journal – do you have one yet? Don’t sweat it if you don’t. Grab a used notebook and a marker, a word-heavy magazine, or even an old newspaper will do. The point of the journal is just to get the words, thoughts, fantasies, and dreams out of your mind and body.
I made a pretty big leap here today. Even I thought I was going to talk about Winter Food (which I will tomorrow, I promise). But I was reminded of the way the vegetables would come to attention as though they were summoned by the sun, life-giving, energy envoy.
Where do you get your life? How do you transmute your energy? What is your life for?
Free write for ten minutes and see what comes up for you.