It’s still winter where I am near the Blue Ridge mountains on the east coast of Turtle Island. The snow is beautiful, but the invisible ice layer that covers it makes it hard as concrete and dangerous. Walking on it requires all my attention; one wrong move and down I go—or worse, an unnatural twist of the body, resulting in a strained knee or ankle.

I’ve committed to a full moon cycle of daily visits to the forest. The above has made my task extra difficult this past week, testing my resolve daily, requiring unexpected fortitude.

That’s some of the “what” I’ve been up to. The “why” will take us down a meandering road that scoffs in the face of the straight line.

This past fall put me through the wringer. Whether dragged or stumbling forward, I can’t be sure. All I know is by the time I got to December I was bone-weary. This fatigue was born from the soul exposing, psyche scouring, timeline excavating, incarnational wound and trauma witnessing that went down.

I, along with a couple brave sisters, found ourselves entangled in a lifetimes-old story of wound and rupture. The surfacing of this wound was bleeding through into our daily lives and interactions.

I didn’t know what a toll this undertaking had on me until it was over. I found myself sliding and slamming into my winter cave’s door. There I lay, collapsed at the cave’s entrance. Too exhausted to move, I felt like I had to be dragged into it by my ancestors.

On the outside, this looked like me initiating an out-of-the-office reply, saying “no” to almost every engagement that came my way, and going dark. My phone lay abandoned in some corner, no doubt lighting up with texts and vox messages.

I made the mistake once of coming into my email. I was looking for some reference, and I ended up seeing a request. My whole nervous system erupted in a frazzled roar.

I remember one of the days around solstice. It was a satisfyingly dark and dreary day, treacherously cold outside. We started a fire in the hearth. I sank into the comfy over-size chair, furry blanket wrapped around me tightly. On the coffee table before me lay my journal, a novel, an ephemeris–all items I’d planned to peruse. But I couldn’t lift my arms to grab them. So I just sat there, staring into the fire—for hours.

I want to pause to acknowledge that this email may feel a little heavy, but the darkness has always helped me keep it real. The darkness is how I stay close to truth and intimate with my soul. There’s no way I could access the bottomless well of motivation to create beauty and magic if I did not dance intimately with these places.

My deepest spiritual truths have rarely been earned by skipping around with rainbows and unicorns; it’s true I may have caught a glimpse of what is possible when I rainbow-romp, but it has never led to embodied wisdom.

The secret to how I live such an enchanted mythic reality is that I meet the shadow, confront it, dance with it. Together we’ll wrestle, argue, scream up a storm, sometimes collapse in a fury, other times faint in exhaustion or surrender.

Sure I look shiny AF when I emerge. But that’s only half of the story.

This is partly why I’m feeling so done with IG and FB. Because you only see squares of curated perfection. What’s in between the fucking squares? That’s what I wanna know. And not all of it, thank you very much. But let’s not pretend the space in between the squares doesn’t exist. This is all part of the huge overhaul of patriarchal conditioning and decolonizing my work and life I’ve been up to.

Where was I? Right . . . the forest. Well, no, not quite to the forest just yet. I think we paused right at the collapse in surrendered fatigue.

So I’m lying on the cold stone floor of the Cave of Winter. I’m too tired to even lick my wounds or tend to my emotional bruises for weeks.

It wasn’t until the New Moon stirred my thoughts into form that I learned the system exhaustion is about more than recuperating from the deep healing marathon I’ve been on. My entire system is actually rewiring itself: the way I’ve communicated with self and other; how I relate to the world around me; how I interact with the Otherworld of Spirit—it is all reconfiguring!

I don’t have to “do” anything for this process to occur. In fact, the less my mind interferes the better. The only need is space for “non-doing” and the forest.

Like matrix tiles falling into place, I saw how the forest would hold me in a container of deep witnessing and integration. It carries all the wisdom my system requires to make this shift. All I have to do is go to it.

To take the pressure off, there are no rules except one: EVERY DAY. That’s it. No specific distance into the forest, no specific place–the forest’s edge is just as good as the deep forest where the river rushes or where the mountain climbs. There’s also an absence of any minimum time requirement—five minutes is just as acceptable as 2 hours.

As I write to you, I’m on Day 22 of Going Into the Forest. 

How have you journeyed this winter? Any internal shifts you’re noticing taking place?