10 Weeks of Winter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year…

A journal style blog exploring the pleasure and enjoyment of winter.

First Post — 10 Weeks of Winter: An Introduction

Michelle is an American born Canadian resident of the Pacific Northwest, hobby writer, book lover, and generally of the autodidact polymath smattering of knowledge, skills, and interests.

Category: Week 1

  • Counting on songbirds… Every day of my life the sun has risen and the sun has set. Every year the seasons turn. Without fail the tides wash in and recede. In the short span of time I have and will exist on this Earth, mountains, cities, rivers, lakes, roads, continents, and oceans endure like permanent…

  • Endings… Abstaining: probably a good post-Thanksgiving topic, but I didn’t select it for that reason. After interventions (adding actions, processes, and activities), my focus for structural changes within my 10 Weeks of Winter project turns to abstinence. What needs to be reduced, removed, or limited to make desired change effective? As I relax my mind,…

  • Inclement interruptions… Snow falls in silence transforming the world in the dark of night. The morning arrives to reveal a new landscape. Side streets lay under a heavy white blanket, while main roads obscured with muddy slush track new traffic patterns in the tire prints and intermittent disclosure of where the lines used to be.…

  • Achieving results… Where practice meets routine and routine meets life the common advice for staying focused and carrying on is to set goals or set intentions. A ship needs a destination. An arrow needs a target. A pursuit needs an aim. These are goals. Concrete, clear, defined, measurable, known. But what if the end objective…

  • Almost living… When the workday ends and I shut off the laptop, I habitually turn to the windows to see how the rest of the day feels. How will I spend my evening in the remaining hours of light… … … …never mind, it’s already dark and the only light I see outside is from…

  • Lessons of the wet winter… Water rises high along the river banks in late November. The fields and grounds and potted plants are completely saturated from rain. Rooftop and sidewalk puddles become a fixture of the landscape that ought to be named and added to Google Maps. Meanwhile the moss grows green and happily over…

  • Feeling the freeze… One of the greatest gifts of winter is one I’m inclined to fight: slowing down. At a molecular level the cold air arrests momentum lengthening the time between action and reaction. Nearly every children’s cartoon depicting a sudden freeze shows the fish or the frog or the flower or the chattering squirrel…