Summer’s Child, Winter’s Student: A Lesson in Renewal

I have always been a summer girl. Born into the brilliance of Australian heat, I learned to measure joy by the length of a day — sunlight stretching long across the horizon, waves curling into warm blue walls, sand dusting my skin like sugar. My childhood was written in salt water and bare feet swinging from counters, in the laughter of neighbors carried on late-night air, in ballet recitals where I moved my body like a bloom unfurling toward the sun. Summer was abundance. It was certainty. It was joy. It was the rhythm of my heart.

For most of my life, I resisted its opposite. As autumn dimmed the light and winter crept closer, I felt a deep, unexplainable sadness, as though something essential was being taken away. I’d mourn the short days, the bite of cold, the closing in of windows and walls. The world seemed to narrow, and so did I. But this year, I want to meet that darkness differently.

History reminds us that the fear of winter is a timeless phenomenon. For generations, as the days darkened and the blizzards came, the Anishinaabe people warned of the Windigo. He is the monster of winter, dripping with ice and white with snow, and he is starving.

“He is a human turned cannibal. His hunger is never satiated, and it endangers everyone around him. He thinks only of himself,” wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, recalling the teachings of her ancestors. The Windigo is not only a story of cold; it is a warning of what happens when scarcity turns us inward, when selfishness devours community.

I think of that story now as I brace for the cool temperatures, for the fall and the looming winter ahead. My instinct has always been to fight against winter, to pine for the lotus-blue oceans of my childhood and the space where I feel the safest. Perhaps the lesson isn’t to fight it at all, but to understand what the darkness asks of us. Winter forces us inward — into our homes, our families, our memories. It teaches us to conserve, to tend to what matters most, to fight the hunger of isolation with the fullness of connection.

Even in war, I’ve seen this cycle: light and darkness, loss and renewal. In conflict zones, winter magnifies suffering. Cold presses into bones already thinned by hunger and fear. And yet, I’ve also seen families huddled together under broken roofs, sharing the tiniest scrap of bread, sharing stories, keeping one another alive. The Windigo can be resisted — but only through community, through selflessness, through light.

As a child ballet dancer, I knew this cycle without knowing it. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was always part of my training, the violins sketching arcs of joy and stillness. “Summer” was the soundtrack of my body — its fire, its vigor. “Winter” always unnerved me, its sharp notes like shards of glass. Ballet, however, demanded that I move through all of them, that I inhabit frost as much as warmth. Perhaps that was the quiet lesson: that there is beauty even in the pause, in the contraction, in the hush between movements.

Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Still, nostalgia tugs. I close my eyes and see the great cathedral space that is the extended sunshine, endless and bright, the smell of tropical rain and sunscreen and sweet mangos. The memory is a refuge, but also a challenge. Because if I only ever live in the warmth, I will miss the gifts of the other seasons. Autumn’s amber light teaches us about letting go. Winter’s silence forces us to hear ourselves. Spring’s sudden rush proves resurrection is possible. Each season, with its unique beauty, is a gift to be cherished.

When the world feels as though it is cracking open — in geopolitics, in personal grief, in the relentless churn of uncertainty — the temptation is to despair. Yet the seasons remind us that nothing lasts, neither suffering nor joy, neither abundance nor scarcity. Each has its place in the cycle. Each prepares the way for the next. This cyclical nature of life offers reassurance and hope for the future.

This fall, I will try to approach myself differently. To light candles not in defiance of the dark but in dialogue with it. To linger with family at the table, to let conversation be the hearth. To accept hibernation not as exile but as rest. To resist the Windigo, the spirit of greed and consumption in Anishinaabe tradition, is to turn away from self-interest and remember the whole: the community, the delicate web that binds us together. Within this web we discover connection, strength, and the support that sustains us all.

Then there are the words from Ecclesiastes — “to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.” They remind me that life unfolds in rhythms beyond my control: a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to scatter and a time to gather. What I’ve learned is to lean into those rhythms, to understand that each moment, whether tender or brutal, belongs to the human drapery. Nothing lasts forever, yet nothing is wasted.

Through the years, James Taylor has also subconsciously helped me to reframe the struggle with darkness. In war zones, in far-flung places falling apart around me, I listened to his voice on repeat, sometimes the only constant in days that felt unmoored. During the pregnancy loss of our son earlier this year, when grief hollowed the hours into something unbearable, it was Taylor who steadied me. Later, in the cocoon our little condo kitchen, twirling barefoot with my daughter beneath the low light, it was still the same song — You Can Close Your Eyes.

“Well, the sun is surely sinkin’ down
But the moon is slowly risin’
So this old world must still be spinnin’ ‘round
And I still love you.”

Those words, although I did not realize until now, became a compass. They reminded me that even when the sun disappears, the moon rises. There is still light. Even when life breaks, the world still turns. Love remains. That melody tied together the jagged chapters — war and peace, loss and renewal, every season — into a promise I could hold.

Summer will return, as it always does, each with a year of wisdom and learned experience behind it. This year, I want to walk through the seasons without resentment, to surrender into each one and allow it to carry me as the music once did, one phrase into another. To trust that life’s arc — war to peace, light to dark, summer to winter — is not an ending but a turning.

And when the deeper cold comes as the solstice approaches, I will not mourn the loss of sun alone. I will look for the light that glows in smaller ways: in the hush of snow, in the clasp of a hand, in the warmth that still burns inside us. To accept. Accept the flow of the universe rather than resist.

That may be how we endure, not by clinging to summer forever, but by learning to love the seasons of life that follow — even the ones that frighten us.

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