It’s the first week of classes from winter break, and I always enter this week feeling unprepared. In part because I’ve fallen out of rhythm, the long nights of dark lulling me into to the feeling that I can just rest–hibernate according to the light. Doing work in a rhythm with the short days and long nights.

That is one of the not so great things about our technology. We’ve divorced ourselves from the pattern of light where we wake and sleep with the sun. And we are a species of light. We are solar powered, so these long moments of dark are times when our biology rebels against the need to keep working all night with the lights one.

There’s a gentleness to powering down and up with the ambient. One day, I read a student’s manuscript all day, while it rained then broke outside; and it felt right that it was what I did. I snuggled against the cold under sweaters and blankets, hunkered into the early sunset, and just read. Granted it was work still, but it was a work in place. A work that participated in the hibernation rather than warring with it. Of course that isn’t our lives. And I took that day slowly on purpose because this is week are the days when the rush and slide into summer begins.

And once we hit summer, the year is practically over. Isn’t it?