[Journaling Exercise] Rest and Reflection for the Winter Solstice

A journaling and tarot exercise as we step into winter ☃️

This is Five and Nine, a podcast and newsletter at the crossroads of magic, work and economic justice. We are currently between seasons. You can catch up on Apple, Spotify, Google and Instagram.

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New York’s Central Park as winter sets in. Photo by Ana.

It’s that quiet time of year in the Western world, when we push projects into the new year when we can and the out of office emails start popping up as people wind down for the holidays. Sometimes this can be a lonely time, sometimes it can be a lively time. Undoubtedly, it’s not the usual time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we manage and spend our down time. We’re in a historic moment when the four day workweek seems like a real possibility as a standard for many industries, or at least a competitive perk. I was talking to someone in their 20’s, and they said that their generation works to live, rather than lives to work. Which is something of an important generational shift, one that I hope survives the recession many are expecting next year.

I’ve recently been enjoying Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, in which she explores the idea that humans have seasons. Times of grief and loss are like winter, and there’s no shortage of that in 2022. She writes:

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential.

But winter is like winter, too. And what I mean by that is that literal winter is a natural time to slow down and reflect, regardless of where we’re at in our lives. I feel my body freezing up, literally, in the cold, and wanting to conserve its energy. I find myself staying inside by the proverbial fireplace and wanting to take stock of the past year. 

Here at Five and Nine, we’ve entered the pause between seasons of the podcast. We’re also busy preparing for our new class series on tarot and writing for The Shipman Agency, which we’re very excited about. So in this period of downtime and quiet, it seems like a good opportunity to offer an exercise to help us journal, to reflect, to turn inward and ask what we’ve learned, where we’ve struggled and where we’ve grown over the past year.