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Early spring means that many of the creatures who hibernated, are now emerging. I’ve seen a few butterflies and one bat. Here in the UK, the hedgehogs will be waking up as well. Many amphibians hibernate, and wake with the warmer weather.  In other places, the great hibernators are bears. I wish we had bears here, but as with many larger mammals, the intensity of human activity in the UK pushed bears out a long time ago.

Late in the autumn, when the weather is cold and the nights long, I feel an urge to hibernate. I want to pull in, wrap myself in blankets, sleep more. I go to bed earlier and I go out less. I feel keenly the imposition of clock time and school time that requires me to get up in the dark.

In the old days, people would hibernate somewhat in the winter.  Tools would be repaired, activities went from tending the earth to resting.  Animals were tended but outside work was minimal mostly because the weather prohibited it.  Though there were worries about food and fuel lasting through the dark times, it was a quieter more restful time of the year.

Now we don't have the luxury of staying indoors by a warm fire.  We also don't have to worry about food or fuel being scarce.  The frenetic pace of life continues even when we get a snowstorm dropping inches of snow on us.  We wait until the plows dig us out and continue with our lives.  Rarely do we take a day or week or more to stay at home, cuddle in and ignore the fast pace life we normally have.  

As this year ends I have been learning about the time referred to as "time out of time" that exists between the winter solstice or yule and the day we celebrate as New Year's Eve. These days that have felt like a state of limbo for me in the past, are in actuality rooted in ancient belief's as being magical, powerful, spiritually potent days of floating between this realm and the higher realms.

We were lucky this time, here in the southern highlands of Appalachia.  The punishing winds and the ice and the sleet passed us by, as surely as if we had daubed the doorjamb with lamb's blood.  What we got was a lazy eighteen-hour snowfall.

From the snug window, we watched the small light flakes pepper the landscape, relentless, implacable. There were separate periods of light or no snow and then the snow-globe world would return. The streetlight reflecting on the snow made the front room almost as bright as day.