Rewilding Time

On wintering, rest, and listening to the body though the Wheel of the Year

In recent weeks, I’ve been going to bed at indulgently early times.

Most of the year, sleep arrives around 9:30 or 10pm. But lately, I’m fighting to finish chapters of books before sleep overtakes me a full hour or more earlier. Not because I’m exhausted, but because my body says, simply and without drama: it’s time.

December darkness settles in early. By six o’clock, it feels like the day has been over for hours. I notice how my shoulders drop when I stop fighting that fact. I notice how little persuasion my body needs. I’m not setting alarms. I’m not using lights to trick myself awake. I fall asleep when my body says sleep, and I wake when it says we’re done here.

This feels almost subversive.

In past Decembers, I would have pushed through. There were things to finish, loose ends to tie, a sense that if I could just clear the decks, January would arrive cleaner, more manageable. The holidays often amplify that impulse, dressing up the hustle as obligation, masquerading productivity as care.

This year, I’m choosing differently. I’m choosing sleep. And in doing so, I’m choosing health over performance. Listening over forcing. Repair over “momentum.”

Which is to say: I’m listening to and immersing myself in my wintering.

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The thing I want to be clear about is this: this is not a rest manifesto. (We need those and I highly recommend the book Rest is Resistance if you’re looking for one.)

This is about listening to the body in relationship with the year itself.

Winter asks for rest and reflection, yes. But other seasons ask for other things. There are times for planting and times for harvesting. Times for creating and initiating. Times for movement, outwardness, long days spent outside, sweat and risk and growth. There are seasons for momentum.

Winter is not one of them.

Winter is the season of boundaries, of discernment, of repair. It is a season for tending what is already here rather than demanding something new from ourselves. The nourishment we need now is different from what we’ll need in the spring, and pretending otherwise is one of the quiet violences of modern life.

We live as though the year is flat. As though time makes no demands of us beyond forward motion. As though the body should remain productive, available, and consistent regardless of light, temperature, or fatigue. And when it doesn’t — when we grow tired, resistant, slower — we treat that as a problem to solve.

But what if it isn’t?

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The Wheel of the Year offers a different orientation.

At its simplest, the Wheel of the Year is a way of understanding time as cyclical rather than linear, marked by seasons, thresholds, and turning points. It’s an old framework, rooted in land-based cultures that understood something we’ve largely forgotten: life moves in rhythms, not straight lines.

What matters here is not adopting a belief system or memorizing the names of old cross-quarter and quarter celebrations. The paradigm shift isn’t about how the universe works. The shift is about how we work.

Living in alignment with the Wheel of the Year means allowing our internal rhythms — our energy, our creativity, our need for rest — to move with the same intelligence that governs the land. Not rigidly or performatively, but receptively.

It’s not about doing winter “right.”
It’s about letting winter do something to you.

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I first encountered this shift through my work with European wisdom teacher Ro Marlen.

Ro both held the container and initiated me into it — not by imposing a new system for me to adopt, but by listening closely to what was already arising in me and gently nudging me further into it. There was never a sense of being corrected or reshaped, only an invitation to go deeper into what was true.

In our work together, I have noticed this: once you see a different way of being, once you embrace it, you can’t go back.

I’ve found that to be true. Not because the old ways vanish overnight, but because they begin to feel inauthentic. Linear goal-setting, hustle framed as responsibility, hustle framed as worthiness, the constant pressure to grow, scale, produce—regardless of season or cost…they just don’t work anymore.

Once you feel yourself operating differently, those models start to chafe. You notice how much effort it takes to sustain them. You notice how lifeless they are.

Everything works in a spiral, Ro often reminds us. We return to familiar questions, but from a different altitude. With more context, more breath, and more capacity.

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For me, this year has been about rewilding.

Not in the romantic sense. In the remembering sense.

Rewilding has meant returning to instinct, allowing the body to lead rather than dragging it behind the mind’s plans. It’s meant re-engaging with animism: experiencing the world as alive, as full of presence and agency. Rocks, trees, land — and even time itself — not as inert backdrops, but as living participants.

When you begin to see the world this way, time stops behaving like a resource to be managed. It becomes something you’re in relationship with. Something that has texture and tone. Something that asks different things of you depending on where you are in the year.

This shift has slowed my decision-making. It’s increased my tolerance for not knowing. When difficulty arises (and it has, in profound ways) I’m less inclined to push through it or rush toward resolution. Not because it’s pleasant to sit with uncertainty, but because I’ve come to trust that even hard situations or seasons carry refinement.

That doesn’t make them easy. It doesn’t make them desirable. But it makes them meaningful.

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I think many of us are tired right now in a way that goes deeper than sleep.

The old systems aren’t working the way they once promised to. The definitions of success we’ve inherited are extracting more than they give. We feel this in our bodies long before we articulate it in words.

Burnout isn’t a personal failure. It’s often a signal that we’re trying to live as though winter doesn’t exist.

And winter is here.

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What I find myself returning to, again and again, is the image of the womb.

Winter as enclosure, as protection. Winter as a place where something is quietly gestating, not yet ready to be named. A season where saying no is not a deficiency, but a devotion. Where boundaries aren’t walls, but warmth.

Right now, nourishment looks like sleep. It looks like reflection. It looks like letting questions remain unanswered. It looks like lighting a fire, literal or otherwise, and tending it slowly. It looks like trusting that what comes next doesn’t need to be forced into being.

The Wheel of the Year reminds us that emergence has its own timing.

And winter, when listened to, knows exactly what it’s doing.

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A few special resources for you:

• If you’re interested in going deeper in your winter and listening to what is gestating within, check out Ro Marlen’s Twelve Nights of Winter online immersion. This has replaced the way I did New Year’s resolutions. (I’ll see you there.)

• If you’re ready for more on the Wheel of the Year, read this blog post by Ro — she calls it the Wheel of Becoming, which I just adore.

• My friend Kendra wrote an amazing piece titled “The call of the animist child within” if you’d like to explore more on animism.