When Winter arrived early

For a long time now, winter has been my chosen season of rest. Each year, as the days get shorter and colder, I consciously and intentionally take a step back, taking time away from social media and my creative business. I turn inward. I rest, reflect, and allow myself to pause. For me, over the past five years or so, winter has become my own seasonal permission slip to slow down after a full year of creating, teaching, and showing up.

I think of this as wintering.

The term comes from Katherine May’s beautiful book Wintering, which has accompanied me through more than one fallow season. In it, she writes about winter not simply as a time of cold or darkness, but as a necessary phase of retreat, restoration, and quiet recalibration.

Traditionally, I’ve aligned this practice with the calendar year. Winter comes, I rest. Spring follows, and I return.

But this year, I noticed it was different.

After two solid (and exciting) years of building my art business, steadily, intentionally, and with great love, my winter arrived early. Not in December, but at the end of the summer and beginning of autumn instead. This came as a bit of a surprise!

From the outside, everything looked full and flourishing. In many ways, it was. My word for the year is BLOOM, and I have been living it, expanding creatively, growing my business, collaborating, teaching, and showing up with courage and consistency. There has been genuine growth, colour, and aliveness.

And yet, beneath all that blooming, my body and nervous system were quietly asking for something else. They were asking for rest.

As we moved into autumn, two new words cam to mind: Restore & Replenish. Looking back I think I knew what my body and mind were telling me. So I listened.

I stepped back from social media earlier than usual. I stopped pushing. I turned inward, just as I normally do in winter, but without the external cues of dark evenings and frosty mornings. Instead of resisting it I recognised it for what it was: a natural ebb after a long, sustained period of growth.

A different kind of wintering.

Katherine May reminds us that wintering isn’t something we can always schedule. Sometimes it arrives through illness, grief, exhaustion, or life transitions. Sometimes it comes simply because we have been growing or blooming for a long time without pause.

This year, my winter came at the end of summer, carried gently into autumn.

And then, quietly, something else followed.

After that period of rest and replenishment, I enrolled in an online sketchbook course by artist Karen Stamper. There was no grand intention attached, no outcome to prove, no pressure to be productive. It felt more like nourishment than effort.

And in that gentle, spacious place, something unlocked.

The combination of deep rest and playful, permission-giving learning shifted me out of stuckness. Ideas that had felt distant or muted began to come alive again. I found myself enjoying experimentation for its own sake, mark-making, colour, curiosity, not knowing. Play returned, not as something forced, but as something natural.

And then, almost without noticing, spring begins to stir. Not as a dramatic restart, but as a warming. A soft re-entry. A sense that creativity is no longer something to wrestle with, but something to walk alongside.

The lesson I keep returning to is this: winter doesn’t belong to one season alone.

Rest isn’t reserved for December. Withdrawal isn’t a weakness. Slowing down doesn’t mean we’ve lost our way.

Everything is cyclical.

In nature, blooming is always followed by rest. Fields lie fallow. Trees shed their leaves. Seeds rest underground before they rise again. Creativity moves the same way, through cycles and seasons, not straight lines of constant output.

When we honour our winters, whenever they arrive, we make space for ideas to rekindle, for joy to return, and for our next bloom to emerge.