La Voz de Galicia – December 21, 2025 →
Today winter arrives. A gray, rainy, cold winter. Just as winter should be in this part of the world. A season that begins with the shortest day and the longest night of the year. The longest night! And it’s curious to think about how our moods, spirits, and emotions shift at this time. Perhaps because of the rush of the holidays, which impose upon us the expectation to feel happy, perhaps just because, because the daylight shines for less time, or because the weather doesn’t help us have a social life… Even if we don’t want to, even if we don’t feel up to it, sometimes social life helps us feel a little better.
A quote attributed to Goethe states that “Our destiny often looks like a fruit-tree in winter. Who would think (…) that those rigid boughs, those rough twigs could next spring again be green, bloom, and even bear fruit?” And in these days, when the world feels so unsettled, when humanity frightens us with its cruelty, one has to cling to whatever brings a glimmer of hope: a poem, a song, a cup of coffee with a loved one… Perhaps the most difficult thing about this season is finding the balance between what we feel and what we are supposed to feel, or the moral balance between our circumstances and those of the people around us, or simply… balance. How hard it is to find balance!
Nature teaches us constantly that everything around us changes, that everything is connected: that rain with that green, that cold with those turnip greens. It teaches us that, despite the circumstances, life goes on, one way or another. And we, in the midst of it all, have to learn to live with the reality we’ve been given, because there have always been gray winters, because, as the saying goes, “after rain comes fair weather”…
