Now the season has turned, the first snow arrived, and the dark stretches longer into the day, crowding out the diminished light of November. And the same pugs who once launched the day now burrow deeper under the quilt and prefer not to move at all. When we wake, they look at us sleepily and settle back down. Their bodies understand something essential: winter asks for a different rhythm.
Traditional Chinese wisdom names this clearly. The Huangdi Neijing—the Yellow Emperor’s Classic—teaches that winter is a season for conserving energy, protecting vitality, and turning inward. It even speaks of a human kind of hibernation: not withdrawal from life, but a quieter participation in it. Nature is not dying in winter. It is storing, listening, and preparing.
And my little canine teachers follow the instruction without reading the book.
My tai chi practice shifts as well. Summer movements expand; winter movements deepen. The body settles closer to the earth. Breath sinks lower. Attention gathers rather than spreads. Presence becomes less about doing and more about being.
As I watch Willow and Lyra adjust so easily, I find myself returning to my naturalistic panentheism. If divine presence is within all things—not as a supernatural visitor but as the goodness, truth, and quiet beauty woven through the world—then the slow breathing of two rescue pugs on a cold morning is not separate from the sacred. It is the sacred in a very ordinary register. They rest, and something in me remembers how to rest. They follow the season, and something in me recognizes G*d in that flow of nature. They curl into stillness, and I sense a whisper of the divine in the simplicity of it.
Christian tradition gestures in the same direction. As the nights deepen, we approach Advent—a season not of noise but of waiting. I’m thinking not of the frantic preparation for Christmas, but of attention to life, to the light within. A quiet turning toward what is already present. “The realm of G*d is within you,” Jesus said.
My naturalistic panentheism gives shape to this experience. The divine is not beyond the world, waiting to break in, but rather is the depth of the world itself. G*d is present in the turning of the seasons, in the instinctive wisdom of animals, in the body’s need to rest, in my practice as it slows and deepens. Waiting for Advent becomes less a countdown and more a recognition: the light we await is already here, quietly, in the ordinary fabric of things.
And so I learn from Willow and Lyra. Two small bodies tucked under the quilt, breathing their steady winter breath (to be honest winter snores!). They teach me without knowing they teach. They remind me that rest belongs to the rhythm of the world,
and that the presence of the divine is never far from the warmth of a sleeping dog.
This winter, I intend to follow their lead.
+Ab. Andy