The Quiet of Winter: A Runner’s Reflection

It is in the quiet of winter that seeds are curled into the sigh of tomorrow’s bloom.

In this part of the world, winter is white heat ice curled up next to hot tea and a warm quilt.  It is hot chocolate and snow coated mittens melting on the radiator’s smile.

My garden sleeps under a thick white blanket, seeds dormant as they wait for spring’s thaw, and normally I wait along with it, hibernating in the cozy warmth of a crackling fire, drowsy in my thoughts. This year, I decided to try something different and I have tried to stay as active as I am in the warmer seasons of spring, summer and autumn as I continue running along the snow covered banks, all the while noticing that winter seems to have as many daily changes as the rest of the seasons. The changes are quieter and more subtle, but their beauty just as vibrant.

I started running last spring. Quite impulsively, I signed up for a “learn to run” clinic with The Running Room. At the time, my motivation was routed in healthy living and the desire to get into better shape, and I had secretly always envied the runners I would see running effortlessly (or so I thought at the time).

Once I got over the fact that I was actually out and about in public with a bright red gasping for air sweaty face, I started really seeing the subtle changes of colour lingering in the sky, the way the light created a new world depending on its angle or how many clouds were filtering its rays.  I watched as water droplets clung to the new bud of green, and there were days when I would literally tear up at the beauty of it all.

I learned how to breathe in that beauty and fill my mind with the calm meditation of my rhythm. I make it sound oh so beautifully romantic, but in all honesty running is hard for me and I think it always will be. But within that physical struggle there is something else there that brings me closer to the earth, closer to me. I feel as though a space cracks open inside of me.  It is within that space of quiet that I find myself able to be honest with myself, with others, and this is shaping my life and the direction of my creativity in ways I never could have imagined.

I never dreamed that I would be one of those people who ran in the dead of winter’s dark freeze. And yet here I am, breathing out the frosty air that hangs gently in the cold, and I notice the quiet in the white whisper of winter and my very soul seems to linger in those quiet spaces, content for a time. I also spy, here and there, the vibrant array of seeds waiting for the day when they will fling their arms wide and reveal their potential under the warm skies of spring.

Photo Credits

“Quiet of Winter” © 2010 Darlene J Kreutzer. All rights reserved.

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