Back to the Part of Ourselves That Has Always Known How to Come Home." 🎄Day 10 of 24 Days of Christmas 🎁

When I think of winter, I don’t think first of snow or holiday lights.
I think of a little stream behind my childhood home—sometimes calm as a whisper, sometimes crashing with the wild mood of the sky. In the coldest winters it froze over, turning into a small world of possibility.

I was five. My stomach full of potatoes, my mother swaddling me into my winter coat with the care only a mother understands—pulling the hat down just right, wrapping the wool around me until I felt like a small, warm secret in her hands. I didn’t know then that one day I would bless her for every tug, every adjustment, every layer of love disguised as clothing.

My father held my hands as I stood on the frozen stream. My feet tucked between his. The world was white and simple and close. He’d run with me sliding on my back, then launch me toward my mother, who caught me in that eternal space between laughter and love.

Even then—at five—I remember knowing something tragically beautiful:
we cannot spend every day like this.
This kind of joy is fleeting, but real.
The kind that makes you want time to pause and hold its breath.

And yet, as an adult, I’ve found that feeling again and again. My eyes fill when I see kids sledding or adults forgetting their age on the ice... Last winter, sitting exhausted and happy with friends—some old, some newly discovered—on an Airbnb couch after a day battling the mountain wind, I felt it again. A warmth that echoed that childhood stream. A peace that said: You’ve been here before. You can always find your way back.

We cannot keep moments. But we can keep their imprint.
We can learn the shape of the joy and recognize it when it returns in new forms, with new people, in new places we call home—if only for a weekend ski trip.

So I invite you: go back.
Not to long for what was, but to remember what makes you feel alive—
and to let that memory lead you toward it again.

Mama, Tata—Kocham was.
And to every friend, every chosen family, every mountain, stream, and living room I’ve rested in: thank you for giving me places to belong along the way.

...

We return because we are made of what we remember.

A cherished memory that brings both joy and ache is a form of inner geography. It’s a place in you:

• where love first took shape,

• where belonging first made itself known,

• where time felt briefly like it could be stopped by sheer presence.

David Whyte often writes that the things that hurt do so because they mattered, and the things that mattered do not disappear just because time has moved on. When you step back into this winter stream, this sliding laughter between mother and father, you are not escaping the present—you are reintroducing yourself to the person who learned what love feels like.

The ache is the price of recognition.
The warmth is the proof of continuity.

Memory is the invitation to inhabit our own depth.

And the pain? It’s simply the sensation of having lived something worth carrying.

Thank you for reading. Love you, mean it!

~felka felka xoxo