Letting go is never easy. The desire to have, to hold, to possess and to control is part of our nature. But the more powerful part yearns to learn the lesson of growth and openness; to enter the mystery of secret loving without desiring, to live in emptiness and stillness and therefore in a state of receptivity and readiness so that the quality of our being and "our being present to" are all that matter.
Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.
~ Katherine May in WINTERING: THE POWER OF REST AND RETREAT IN DIFFICULT TIMES