Greetings!
Happy end of November! The snow has reached us, and my kids were excited to break out their winter boots! I am working on holding on to their excitement and loving the beauty of the snow in the midst of the reality of cold, slippery, and shoveling that lies ahead.
Over the Thanksgiving weekend my family stayed at the Great Wolf Lodge in the Wisconsin Dells. It was so fun to see the kids play with their cousins, go swimming, and just enjoy each others' company. On the door of our room it said "Hibernation hours 11pm-7am." This reminded me of our need for rest, and of nature's rhythms and need for rest as well. I thought about bears and other animals entering into hibernation for the winter, storing up their energy for when spring arrives. Or the lion, which sleeps up to 16-20 hours a day so that it has energy to hunt the other few hours left in the day (a fun fact I learned when I used to work at a zoo camp!). We humans need that balance too, allowing our autonomic nervous system to come back into balance by giving our parasympathetic nervous system time to kick in and settle in. Our natural rhythms are beautiful-may we trust and honor the process, even when it's not as fast as we might want it to be! Today, I invite you into this quote from Lao Tzu: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished."
May we be safe, healthy, have joy, and live in peace.
-Sarah Vining
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