Field Notes of a Wanderer

Winter doesn’t arrive

so much as recalibrate the world.

First a thinning,

light siphoned from the sky

in long, slow increments,

as if the earth is teaching us again

the math of enough.

The forests feel it earliest.

Each tree, a quiet instrument

tuned to the smallest shift

in the planet’s tilt,

listens as the cold

reorganizes its cells.

Sap thickens.

Energy pulls inward.

The whole woods enters

a deep and ancient agreement:

rest

is not the opposite of living,

but part of its intelligence.

Across the fields,

snow writes its own lexicon …

patterns of wind,

footprints of passing creatures,

the invisible map of thermal drift

laid down in white script

for anyone patient enough

to read.

Winter slows everything

to the pace where meaning appears.

You finally notice

how many worlds move inside one:

the hush of breath leaving your body,

the brittle architecture of each branch,

the small persistence

of a single bird

in a sky emptied of warmth.

You notice

how silence is not a void

but a habitat …

a place where thoughts migrate

when the noise of the year

falls away.

And under it all,

beneath frost and root

and the sleeping rhythm of the soil,

life waits with exquisite precision,

timed to the unseen clockwork

of the turning earth.

Winter is not death.

It is data,

the season’s long archive

of everything the world remembers

about how to begin again.

cm.w

2025 ©️ Christina Whalen

All rights reserved.