OPENING LETTER FROM VAL

The Season You Feel Before You See It

by Val White

Where I grew up, spring didn’t announce itself.

There were no dramatic cues — no snow melting into muddy rivers, no frost giving way to crocuses pushing through cold ground.

 In South Florida, the calendar might say April, but the air said the same thing it always says. Hot. Thick. Alive in that particular tropical way that makes the whole world feel like it’s breathing through a warm, wet cloth.

We had one season, really. And then, occasionally, a cold front would drift through somewhere between October and January, and for two, maybe three glorious days, you could wear a sweater. 

People lost their minds over it. Fires were lit. Boots were worn. And then, just as quickly, it was gone, and we were back to mango season and ceiling fans spinning slow overhead.

So I grew up without seasons. Except — I didn’t.

Because even without the weather to guide me, something inside me always knew. 

Every autumn, I felt a quiet drawing inward, a turning toward the hearth of myself, even when there was no hearth and no chill to justify it. 

Winter brought a sense of sacred stillness, an incubation, like something was being formed in the dark that wasn’t ready to be named yet. 

Summer cracked me open — wide, wandering, free. 

And Spring was always a rising; A becoming. 

I felt it arrive in my chest before I ever saw it anywhere else.

To everything — turn, turn, turn. There is a season — turn, turn, turn.

I’ve lived a few lives since those Florida island days when daily walks to the beach with my mother on the Isle of Capri were a daily ritual when I was a little boy, and the inland cow pastures of my adolescence and early adulthood. 

Twelve years in Southern California, where the Los Angeles seasons were more suggestion than certainty — a slight softening of the light in November, jasmine on the breeze in March, fire weather in the fall. You had to lean in to feel them. But they were there, if you were paying attention. And I was always paying attention.

Then Asheville North Carolina happened, and for the first time in my life, the outside world caught up with what I’d been feeling on the inside my whole life. 

Actual autumn. Actual winter. Leaves that turned and fell like they meant it. A spring that was undeniable — a riot of dogwood and redbud and green so new it almost hurt to look at.

Now we’ve landed in North Florida — Adam and I, ever the nomads — and I’ll tell you something: North Florida can give you all four seasons in the span of a single week. 

It is equal parts chaotic and deeply my kind of place.. I am a gemini after all. 

But right now, in this moment, regardless of what the thermometer says outside my window? I feel spring.

I feel it the way I always have — from the inside out. 

That quiet uprising. 

The sense that something that has been resting is ready to rise. 

That the story I’ve been incubating is ready to be told. 

That version of myself who went a little quiet these past few months has not disappeared — composting, turning over, getting ready.

Maybe you feel it too?

I’ve been wondering about that. Whether the energetic shift of spring is something we all carry — whether it lives in the body the way instinct does, independent of latitude or weather forecast or whether you’re in a high-rise in Chicago or barefoot on a back porch in the sleepy town of LaBelle.

I believe it does. I believe there is a season inside you right now asking to be honored.

In the pages ahead, I want to share some of the ways renewal is moving through my own life this spring — in my home, in my practice, in my work with Adam, in the deeper standard I’m returning to. 

And I’d love to hear from you. Not just what you’re planning or producing or accomplishing — but what is being renewed in you. 

What is asking to emerge?

Let’s not rush it. Let’s tend it.

Let’s become the next season of us — together.

With warmth and wonder,

Val