This time last year I was descending rapidly into burnout. I hadn’t fully grasped just how unsustainably I was operating, but I felt deeply terrible and didn’t know how to trust what might happen to my career or my family if I stopped pushing. Things that seemed like opportunities for rest – weekend trips or retreats, lunches and suppers out, visits, invitations to connect or discuss how things were going with friends or mentors – all felt like more work. Every day and every conversation felt like more and more work, and work infused everything.

Ramona Nicholas had recommended a book to me, and I was listening to it on Audible during my commutes to Fredericton. What I’ve shared below is from the chapter “Mkwa Giizis: Bear Moon” in Asha Frost’s You Are the Medicine. This is a story about a talented, dependable bear who doesn’t know how to manage their own energy. When they burn out and get sick, they’re forced to rest for a season, but there is no choice in this rest. “It is my responsibility to manage my own energy,” Bear tells their friends and family after learning this hard lesson and emerging from their long season of recovery – “I know this now. From now on, I will be mindful of my capacity to help, and when I feel tired, I will listen to my body and rest.”

I really loved this story – I listened to it while sitting in my car outside of the office and texted Ramona afterward to say, thanks, I needed that. The story deeply resonated with me and I felt comforted, and so lately I have been thinking about what learning means for me. Where is my knowing? Because I heard, loved, and understood this story, thought it was beautiful, thought of it often, but it didn’t change the way I was operating at all. A few months later, I tweaked something in my back while out walking the dog in our neighbourhood. Didn’t listen to this either, just kept foolishly driving to Fredericton and meeting with students – I even went to a conference in Sackville. But I had to leave that conference a day early when I woke up one morning and couldn’t walk down the hallway. Gina Brooks pumped gas into my car that morning while I sat in the driver’s seat, unable to climb out myself, and then she followed me back to Menahkwesk in her truck to help me get from my car into the house. I ended up with a nerve injury that laid me up on the couch for a long season.

And so we learn the same hard way the bear does even when we hear the warning in their story and understand it in our bones. Even when we know what to do, we do something else instead — inexplicably and against our own knowing, against our own bodies. And we still don’t know if we’ve learned, really, and we worry all the time that maybe we are about to learn again.

I share this story with you on the occasion of today’s big, beautiful snowfall in hopes that, if you are feeling that call to rest, the season won’t be too long.