The Art of Burmation (thank you turtles)
Questions for Year-End Dreaming
When my friend Kerry sent me a video of turtles under a frozen lake, barely breathing, and said, “It’s you!” I knew she was right.
During what is called Burmation, snapping turtles find slow-moving water where they can nestle in the mud, under logs, or tangled in roots, and become as still as ice.
Burmation is what scientists call their winter dormancy—a survival reset that allows their bodies to endure for months with very little food and barely any oxygen at all. Their surrender to winter carries them through it.
I am ending this year in what feels like a slow crawl towards its horizon. I have entered my own burmation.
In November I finished my book manuscript (Heartwood comes out in 2025!), after multiple rounds of edits, and in December I turned in my revised PhD thesis (more on this process another time!)
Both of these were acts of devotion, both of these feats required immense and continuous output. Day after day for a whole entire year.
Now, I am swallowed up by the silence of deep winter.
I am too tired to know how to make use of the space. I am sleeping 12 hours a night. I am emerging for walks and then slipping back into the frozen river with my turtle friends.
I am back in Colorado, where I wrote my book on the wisdom of trees and where I wrote most of the PhD thesis on the entanglement between humans and the more-than-human world. This valley is my muse and my writing partner, a co-author with, alongside and through me. I have not so much written here as been written through.
Being back here, but without the effort of holding these works alive, tending to them daily, I can sense in my bones the earth’s pleasure that as I spend time with them now, I do not need anything from them. I do not need their wisdom for my book, or their support to get to the next deadline.
This time, I can just enjoy them. I am unwinding my needs, letting the earth re-teach me how to simply delight in one another. How to loosen the grip of creative output. How to let go into the solace and comfort of snow.
So oddly, even though I have been living inside of words, making my home in sentences and paragraphs, I have little ability to pull them up now.
I have sunk into a wordless place, and there, my soul is quiet.
But I do deeply love reflecting on one year’s end and casting vision for the next. And so, as we inch towards that threshold, I wanted to share a few questions for how you also might cozy up next to dreamtime and listen to your spirit, hear what whispers are audible when the world has gone a little more hushed. Perhaps taking time to answer one or all of these might open up portals or pathways in you, enliven a sense of self-knowing, deepen a sense of knowing all our more-than-human relations, too.
Love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining. - James Hillman
Each time I dare to imagine deeper into my love for my life, that love multiplies.
Like tending a garden, we must nurture the soil of our imagination to keep our love flourishing.
In these times of climate crisis, this flowering of love is not a luxury—it is our survival.
Here are some questions I am asking myself to keep imagining, to keep loving:
How did your relationship with the Earth deepen in the last year? What dreams do you have for this partnership in the next?
Where were you courageous? Where were you afraid? What did you learn from both?
What creatures, critters, plants or trees did you learn from in 2024? What were those lessons? How was that medicine?
What relationships felt particularly nourishing? Why? Who(m) do you want to be a place of nourishment for in 2025?
Where might you grant yourself a little more permission to move towards your own eros in the next year (hint to touch your eros: Where/whom/what does your heart yearn to be nearer? What horizons are tenderly alighting you? What brings you a sense of simmering vitality, however brief?)
As we cast our eyes upon the troubles that may come in 2025, what is your piece of resistance to violence, destruction and ruin? What/whom is a place of resource and resilience that you can tend to in 2025?
What is your experience of being mycellially, synaptically, rhizomatically rooted to love? What does this entangled beingness tell you about what it is to be human? About what it is to be more-than-human?
What is a small ceremony, or blessing, you can create to honor 2024, and all the year held, to make space for what is to come? (This ceremony could be a nap, or a song, a prayer or a dance by a stream. It does not need to be complicated. In fact, let it be as ease-y as can be. But by so doing, we practice embodying scales of time much greater than our own notion of linearity.)
I am moved by and grateful for the many teachers who carried me through 2024. Most especially, for a certain black bear, who visited me again and again in the Roaring Fork Valley. Who showed me how humans and the Earth might be in harmony once more.
As we bid 2024 adieu, I wish many restful moments to you in this season, wherever you are. With an aching heart, a loving heart, a broken heart, a joyful heart. May you find the gift of meeting that heart with the tenderness, reverence, and respect that warrants the life you are living. And if you desire, may you have the space for burmation, too.
With love, and see you in 2025,
Lindsay
