by Audrey Quay.
As the year draws to a close, I have been thinking about what it means to enter the depth of winter, with its shorter days and longer nights. The change is especially striking for someone who has spent most of my life in tropical climes instead of the temperate, four-season British Isles. In our modern world with artificially-created environments, the differences are easier to miss. We can turn on heating and light at the flick of a switch; LEDs and backlit screens keep our bodies in “daytime” long after the sun has set. Supermarkets offer out-of-season produce year-round, even as global supply chains carry their own costs for the climate. Add work schedules, entertainment and device notifications, and we can live as if the year has no dusk—no nudge to close the day, slow down and take stock, no permission to be less productive. Yet outside, creation keeps its own time, and looking outside, I recognise an older wisdom: a season not of constant output, but of conserving, recovering, and preparing.
Animals respond with practiced patience to wintertime. Hedgehogs and dormice hibernate and bats drop into torpor when cold bites, living off energy stored when food was abundant. Birds are thriftier: feeding hard in daylight, sheltering and surviving on what remains. Some leave entirely, like swallows and house martins migrating south, while visiting redwings and fieldfares arrive to take advantage of berries still hanging on (a reminder that British winters are milder than Scandinavia’s!). Even the relatively active make adjustments: foxes and badgers spend more time sheltered, and squirrels draw on hidden caches from their autumn’s work. Much of the plant world waits underground: bulbs sit protected beneath the soil, while many species persist as seeds, holding next year’s growth until conditions are right. Deciduous trees drop leaves to reduce frost damage, drawing resources back into trunk and roots until warmer days return. But the season isn’t empty; hazel catkins, holly berries, and gorse still flower—hints that life is being held in reserve.
Nature’s winter can help remind us to ease off our outward production and consider what we need to collate inwardly. What do we want to carry into spring—and what are we not meant to keep holding on to? As we move through the final days of 2025 and into 2026, what would it look like to store what is nourishing and release what is weighing us down? Who are the lonely and forgotten we have neglected through the year, whom we could reach out to at this time of recuperation and exchange of greeting cards? Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes an older “gift economy” in which abundance is not hoarded in private, but held in relationship, where “all flourishing is mutual.”[1]Ivan Illich terms conviviality “the opposite of industrial productivity”—a way of living in which tools and systems do not eclipse human agency or flatten the world into endless output.[2] Winter makes legible this logic, as it asks less of us outwardly, while drawing attention to the reality that life is sustained by reserves, reciprocity, and the givenness of what we did not manufacture, but can still pass on to others.
As nature denies us the illusion of perpetual spring, it follows the wisdom of Ecclesiastes to remind us that fruitfulness has a rhythm: seasons for expansion and consolidation, for speaking and silence, for striving and for resting. God’s work in us is often patient root growth, gathering strength before it shows itself. Renewal does not have to be announced loudly with ambitious plans and resolutions. It can begin underground and out of sight, unnoticed by the outside world. The year-end culminating with the depths of winter invites me to exercise a purposeful restraint: to let some things remain unfinished, to turn down the noise, to accept limitations without shame, and to rest as a way of receiving.
From the beginning, God’s own rest is declared blessed and hallowed—a boundary woven into creation itself. Sabbath reaches outward to creatures and communities, a rhythm of relief and refreshment extended as far as the soil itself. Jesus defends it as a gift “made for humankind”, and Walter Brueggemann describes Sabbath as resistance because it is “a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”[3] The God of ages is through all seasons Emmanuel. There is a time for everything; in the quieter season of winter, we realign ourselves with the rest of creation, learning again that whether in recuperating or making ready…God’s provision is present, even when we are at rest.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022.
[2] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 5.
[3] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).
Theology Everywhere 