The Only Ending

Winter – Week 52 – On Endings and Beginnings

In Her Nature is a year long exploration into the healing power of the natural world. Season by season, setting out to awaken the spirit, and rekindle joy. The weekly journal of a neighborhood, its plants and birds and creatures – and how they are helping repair a heart and rebirth a soul.

December 31st. The world agrees this is an ending, though if we paid attention to what the land knows, we’d mark our year’s turning at the winter solstice, or better still, at the spring equinox when life actually returns. This arbitrary midnight is a human fiction. The earth keeps its own calendar.

But for me, today truly is an ending. Fifty-two weeks ago, I made myself a promise. I would write every week for a year. I would step into the landscape surrounding my Colorado home and let it teach me what it knew. I would show up, no matter the weather, no matter my mood, no matter how broken I felt. And today, with these words, I complete that promise. This is my ending.

Someone once told me that you don’t actually lose yourself when life breaks you. You just bury the parts of you that couldn’t be safe in the moment. I’ve carried that truth with me through this entire year of writing. Three years ago, the accident shattered more than my bones. It buried parts of me so deep I thought they were gone forever. The part that trusted my body. The part that felt at home in the world. The part that could sit still without the screaming need to prove I was okay, I was fine, I was handling it.

Healing, I’ve learned, is about uncovering what was buried, even when it still feels unsafe. It’s about creating the conditions where those hidden parts can finally breathe again. The land became that place for me. The wind and open sky and changing seasons slowly coaxing those hidden parts back into the light.

Something in me remembered out there, and stirred my soul. Every week this year, I felt that awakening. My whole being recalibrating. The fractured pieces finding their way back together, not because I was working at it, but because I was finally standing in the place I was designed to be.

I didn’t know this would happen when I started. I thought I was just writing about birds and weather, documenting what I noticed each week in a landscape still new to me. But the land showed herself, and kept teaching. Cold winds that made my cheeks pink taught me I could still feel. Squirrels foraging frantically before the first snow reminded me that survival is active, intentional, beautiful. The bees, tucked deep into their winter cluster, showed me that sometimes the work is to go dormant, to trust the dark months, to know that spring will come even when you cannot imagine it. The land gave me back to myself, week by week, word by word.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped being an observer and became a participant. I realized I wasn’t just watching the deer move through the twilight or the coyote slipping through the grasses at dawn, I was part of the same story they were. Another creature finding her way back home.

When darkness descends and the end stands uncertain, I have learned this year to return to the beginning. To become vast and wild. To become one with the rivers and trees. To remember that I am not separate from the hawks circling above or the rabbits darting below. We are all just living, all just trying to make it through our own winter into spring.

So many people find no cause for wonder. They sit idly instead of going to see what is on view in the great theatre of the world. I have always noticed the world around me. But I’d never committed to this kind of sustained attention and reflection. Never stayed with the land long enough to let it change me. I didn’t know that healing could happen in the witnessing of a single yellow aspen leaf falling. In the way early morning light hits frost. In the sound of wind moving through dry winter grass.

I think more about weathering these days now. How everything in nature is slowly being worn back to the earth. Even the mountains, grain by grain, returning to dust over millennia. The river rocks in the creek below the barn, once jagged and sharp, now smooth as glass from centuries of water. I am being weathered too. My edges softening, my sharpness worn away by time and wind and years of simply being here. I am closer now to the land’s embrace than to my beginning, and there is something honest in that. The land doesn’t fight its weathering, it accepts the slow polishing, the gradual return. I am learning to do the same.

The horses stand in their winter coats, patient with the cold. The geese still gather overhead in great numbers, darkening the skies, not yet ready to leave. Everything in nature knows when to rest, when to wait, when to trust the dark season.

Standing now at this ending I’ve chosen for myself, I feel the weight of what I’ve accomplished and the bittersweetness of what I’m leaving behind. A year of essays. A year of showing up for myself and for this land and for those who have walked alongside me through these words, who might recognize themselves in the breaking and the mending. I am proud of this, and also a little sad it’s over.

But here’s what I’ve learned about endings: they’re not always given to us by circumstance. Sometimes we have to choose them. Sometimes we have to say, “Here. This is where this chapter closes. Not because it has to, but because I’m ready for what comes next.” Because not everything has an ending. Sometimes the only ending is the one we give it.

This year changed me, week by week. With each bird song. Each cherry blossom. Each warm August night. The parts of me I buried, the ones I thought were gone forever, they came back. Not perfectly, not completely, but breathing. Enough to feel whole again. Enough to remember what it means to be wild, to be fully alive in this strange and beautiful world.

I don’t know yet what this new year will bring. But I know I’ll meet it with wind-tangled hair and dirt under my fingernails and the kind of wonder that comes from paying attention. From showing up and knowing that the great theatre of the world is always performing, and all I have to do is step outside and watch.

The year is complete. The circle closed.

Thank you, broken heart that taught me how to mend. The woman who closes this page is not the one who opened it. I am freer, more whole, more myself. The land kept its promise. And so did I.

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—> What moments of natural wonder caught your attention this week? Please share your stories and photos in the comments below. Let’s experience nature’s gifts together.

As always, thank you so much for reading and supporting me.

Love,

Jane