I am sitting in my she shed, coloring like a little child. Outside, a winter storm is whistling — raw and relentless — but every so often it is interrupted by something tender: a bird chirping somewhere out in the cold, the soft voice of a wind chime. And in those small, stolen moments between sounds, my mind drifts to life. To seasons. To the way one always, eventually, gives way to another.
I know what a winter season of the soul feels like. The kind that tucks itself away quietly, buried under inches of snow. Not a season of living — a season of surviving. Endured out of necessity, out of protection. A stillness that isn't giving up, but is instead the deep, wise knowing that sometimes going still is the only way through.
But then come the glimpses. The first breath of something new. Flowers that were dormant — buried under the weight of dirt and snow and time — begin, without announcement, to stir. They don't rush. They don't explain themselves. They simply, quietly, come forth as beauty. Like a lotus flower rising through dark water, the journey is never through clean or easy places. It moves through the muck. Through the murky, unclear terrain of healing. And still, it rises — drawn toward the light filtering down even through the cloudiest water.
That light carries energy. And a soul shaped by trauma knows something about energy that refuses to disappear. Because inside that soul — through every season of being tossed, buried, pressed beneath the weight of what life brought — there was a fire. A fierce, stubborn, beautiful fire that would not be extinguished. That would not allow itself to be buried permanently. That knew, in its own time, it would push through.
There is a fierceness that refuses to stay buried — that knows, in its own time, it will rise.
And so it pushes — through the murkiness of healing, toward truth, toward life, toward God. In His power. In His majesty. In His loving, steady hand that never once released its grip on the soul being tossed by life. The soul carrying the weight of trauma, the marks of hard seasons. He never lost hold of her most protected, innermost essence — even in the moments she could not feel it. Even when she couldn't feel anything at all.
And so, just like the earth after a long, cold winter — she gives birth to spring.
#Mental Health
