Winter often gets a bad rap. Beyond playing host to Christmas and New Year’s, which are each met with various feelings of elation, frustration, and angst, winter encompasses grey, cold days filled with complaints of aching bones and aching hearts. Perhaps it is because I was born in winter that I feel cozy and at home when the temperature drops and the days tend towards a never-ending twilight.
Symbolically speaking, winter is death in the archetypal “Circle of Life”. The end. das Ende. Fin. However, nothing could be further from the truth. One of the reasons I love winter when most do not is because I believe it to be a time of rebirth. Behind every blanket of snow, every sheet of ice, every cold wind is a seed. Winter possess liminal potential. Encapsulated within this frozen threshold is promise: promise for warmth, promise for growth, promise for life, and promise for hope.
Understanding this Jungian concept, I knew that a thaw of my wintered heart was inevitable the moment I saw him. A thawing of formidable ice never starts from the outside. It starts from the inside, bubbling up like desire. This desire for warmth, for growth, for life, for hope slides beneath the surface slicing away at the structural integrity of the ice’s resolve. Eventually, this resolve cracks and there is no resisting the birth that pours forth.
There is a fear that comes with being born; a fear that your new hope will wither as quickly as it bloomed. I could not take this risk. Not after having waited so long for him. Not after nurturing these seeds through the winter. Not after tasting the growing heat of desire and warmth of life.
Then the dawn came: A wintered heart holds all promises in abeyance. Especially when it’s one I can keep forever in my freezer.
Unbound 
I like the attitude. Seeing new life coming from the winters of life.