In mid-December, cold weather brought our first real snowfall, covering the ground and trees with a beautiful coating of white. With the natural abundance of the season picked through by feasting birds or covered with snow, we decided to begin our winter setting out of birdseed to feed the hungry birds. Running errands when I thought of this, I returned to our yard and saw a Morning Dove standing under the feeder where families of doves had gathered last winter. The Dove, too, knew that it was time for us to replenish our seeds.

I gathered Sunchoke, the last harvest from our garden. It was a huge crop, so I shared some with a neighbor and began to make new recipes to accommodate the abundance. A lesson from nature, like deer whose coats darken to blend with the wintry brown and grey landscape, and those who live close to the Earth like the Amish and other growers, is to adapt to what the Earth is offering, so I will seek to use the abundant crop in more dishes than usual this winter.

Our beer brewing season is beginning in earnest. We have bottled Irish Red to open on Saint Patrick’s Day and brewed a Robust Porter for Candlemas. On the Winter Solstice, we brewed a Maple Porter—“Viking Winter”—and opened the Viking Winter we brewed on last year’s solstice. It is a heavy, sweet porter that goes well with the long, cold nights of Winter.

As part of the seasonal gatherings, my wife hosted a mother-daughter reunion party for friends of her daughter, their Moms and other women friends of my wife. When my stepdaughter was in high school, my wife and other Mom’s hosted mother-daughter parties, which I viewed as important ways to strengthened their lives. This time, the gathering was an elaborate affair, with rich food, sparkling wine and English-style Crackers that my wife had handmade special for each Mother and Daughter pair. My wife also made what she calls a “tower of power”—nuts, sweets and cookies on several layers of beautiful glass dishes set atop each other.

Though my wife has made clear that I am welcomed—especially now that there are babies and toddlers sharing time with the generations of women—I have always stayed away. In doing so, I follow the teachings of radical feminists and others who explained that to overcome the burdens of patriarchy, women need “a room of their own” to empower themselves and strengthen the lifeblood of their relationships with each other.

For my family and web of life, we are in the aftermath of waves of death, illnesses and accidents that shook our web of life like earthquakes, ending not only lives but several relationships between those that remained. Following the upheaval and sorrow, a wave of new lives began, almost simultaneously as the wave of deaths reached its peak. These new lives have drawn our webs of lives back together, acting like gravity to attract us through the love of children to each other. Our daily lives are now filled with babysitting and strengthening the relationship with the parents and grandparents, much as the mother-daughter parties strengthen the web of life that has brought the new lives into this hard and wonderful Earth.

In this time of change, of deep darkness, rotting leaves and dead plants, and slow beginnings of Earthly renewal, I am considering what I have learned since the last ending/beginning a year ago. At that time, I began a study to find out how I might have greater faith. Last winter, still feeling the raw pain of mortal loss, with the new lives only beginning to take root in our family and community, I recognized that I have little faith. Faith is a spiritual strength and enables a person to leap chasms of hardship and fear and land unscathed on the other side of new life and new beginnings. For all its ability to deceive those who cling to it for denial of life’s hard truths, it is still a strength to be emulated and used for good.

Over the year, I saw the workings of faith in my own life; new practices for a person raised with a blindly skeptical disregard for the spirit of life around me. In particular, I faced trials based on risks we took to follow good works in the world of money around us—not only through charity, but also through setting short-term gain aside so that we could use our good fortune to aid those in need. It led to challenges that I was not prepared for.

In moments when there seemed little hope of things working out, I prayed for a sign about good works in the economic world. Though I once thought of prayer as being practiced by weak-minded people dominated by irrationality, almost as soon as I had prayed for a sign my family received a blessing, leading to a resolution of our long-term worry. Clearly, the spiritual world was responding with an emphatic “Yes!” Good works can work in the world of money, if it is applied wisely.

During the interim, an African American family, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps and showing grace, calm and understanding that often eludes me, managed to buy their own home and move out of a rental apartment. We left on good terms and I was grateful that they had found a home of their own and inspired by their success and friendly natures despite the burdens laid upon them.

They posted quotations from the Bible in places in the apartment, and I asked for them to leave them behind, so I could understand what inspired them. On the inside of their front door was a quotation from their translation of Timothy, which read:

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7).

I reflected that these African Americans and their young children walked out into a world of hardship and challenges that I cannot fathom; their message to themselves and their children in facing a world not of their creation was powerful to me. I am grateful for knowing them and gladden by their success.

Though I was bullied and psychologically abused during my childhood by bigoted, wealthy whites who claimed to be Christians, I seek to learn from all traditions. During my recovery from psychosis, I met people who truly sought to follow the teachings of Jesus, rather than use it to seek power-over-others, as the hypocritical whites did in my childhood community. This discovery, and treatment for the trauma of my youth, enables me to be inspired by that which inspired these faithful African Americans.

As I consider this year’s lesson and next years’ spiritual journey, I hope to find ways that I can act on my faith in good works and in the spiritual strength of the Feminine. To me, acting in this way is the essence of flowing with the Earthly river of life into eternity.

I have learned that there is reason to have faith, yet it difficult to maintain when it is most needed—during our trials in the mortal human world. Acting on faith is to not be daunted by the fears of the hardships of the world, but rather I need to act in line with the spiritual strength of the Earthly and human world. How to do this without bringing harm to myself or the family that needs me, that is the question to ponder in the sleepy darkness of the winter nights.