Each full moon, I write to honor the wild rhythms of nature and the raw truths I carry inside. These are moments to reflect, grow, and be brave enough to be seen.
December’s Cold Moon rises early in the longest nights, hanging low and bright over the sodden world. Sunrise arrives late, sluggish and pale, and the crows I feed have adjusted their rhythm to match it. They don’t call for peanuts until after 8 am these days.
Other rhythms are slowing, too. Clients have left for their vacations, corporations won’t hire until after the holidays, and the Columbia river runs fuller now, swollen with winter rain but moving slow and thick. Everything has slowed except for me. I’m still scanning my task list, feeling my chest tighten at what I’m not doing. My body warns that rest is productive too, but I keep pushing against it.
Winter moves at winter’s pace. I haven’t learned to match it yet.
What Crows Do
My “crow bar” is attached outside my open office window, a curved perch with a food dish, a mere five feet from my office chair. This morning I watch my favorite pair of crows, Robber and Shy, alight one after the other, filling their craws with peanuts. They’ve been coming to me for a year, through snow and strawberries, through the layoff in July, bringing the fledglings they raised in summer. Now their young are nearly grown, smaller but sleek, comfortable enough to sit on the crow bar for shelter from weather.
Robber chokes down five peanuts in their shells and flies to the neighbor’s roof, tucking them under a loose tile. Shy does the same, pulling moss from a planter and pushing the peanuts underneath. They’re caching food, as crows do when the days get short. That’s what their bodies tell them to do in December. They don’t question it.
Me? I question everything. The guilt simmers when I play a phone game instead of working on a client website, or when I edit a manuscript late into the evening instead of going downstairs to have dinner. I see the crows adjust so easily to what the season demands, while I’m still trying to maintain the frantic harvest pace of autumn.
Hauling on Every Net
I have a problem, always trying to do everything.
When an ex-colleague recommended me for a job, I said yes without hesitation. I could interview and keep up with client work, build someone else’s vision and my own at the same time. I split my hours between preparing for interviews and drafting social media posts, polishing my resume while also building my video project. I told myself I was being strategic, keeping options open, doing what made sense.
What I felt was exhaustion. The job went to someone else. My client work moved slower than I wanted, even though my clients were fine with the pace. I’d committed to Lingua Ink in September, then spent days hedging that commitment with applications and interview prep. I wanted to prove I could do everything, and when I couldn’t, the guilt settled in heavy and thick.
The crows found me in my office during daylight hours, but I was there dawn and dusk. They didn’t overwork just because my lights were on. A crow’s body knows when it’s winter, adjusts its metabolism and routines without asking permission, shifts everything to match shorter days and colder nights. They move at the speed winter allows, naturally.
My body knows it’s winter too. The difference is I’ve been ignoring it, telling it we can still run at full speed if we just try harder. The exhaustion is my body’s way of insisting otherwise.
What Winter Requires
The yellow leaves are still clinging to the trees on the riverbank across from my office window. We haven’t had the big windstorm yet, the kind that strips everything bare in a single night. Winter hasn’t fully arrived, but I can feel it coming in the way I want to stay in bed past sunrise and work fewer hours and sit in my chair with a book instead of standing at my desk. Maybe I should listen to my body and nature and the Cold moon.
I can’t fight winter any more than the crows can. What I’m learning, slowly, is that winter’s pace isn’t failure. Everything moves slowly in winter: the work, the growth, the way thoughts unfold in dark mornings before the sun bothers to rise. I’m trying to let my workdays shrink to match the daylight, to build at whatever pace winter allows instead of the pace I think I should maintain.
The crows still call for me each morning, just later than they did in summer. They’re still working, just differently. And I’m learning to do the same, building reserves at winter’s speed while trusting that when the season shifts again, I’ll be ready because I didn’t spend these months fighting what December required of me.
Winter moves at winter’s pace. I’m learning to move with it.
