Dry seasons are part of life. I’ve had mine.
There was the menopause that arrived at 31 — not gradually, not gently, just suddenly and completely, at an age when no one around me could relate. There were the years inside my husband’s world of high-stakes finance — events that would rival any season of Suits, and not in the glamorous way. And then the hips, both of them, needing replacing out of nowhere, the body I had pushed through decades of competition and dance suddenly announcing it had a different agenda entirely. None of the top ten stressors of life did we escape.
The truth is, when life is pushing on you at a level that exceeds your capacity to absorb it, something gets forgotten. And the thing that should stay front and center — the interior life, the practices that actually sustain you — is almost always the first to go. Not intentionally. Just quietly, gradually, the way a fire goes out when nobody tends it.
Prayer goes first. Then the stillness. And church — a place that regularly brings me to tears and allows me to lose myself completely — goes dead. I show up. I listen. I leave. Unchanged. And the longer that goes on, the easier it becomes to stop showing up at all.
This is the paradox of hard seasons: the very thing that would help us through is the thing we quietly abandon. We tell ourselves we’ll return to it when things settle. When the pressure lifts. When we have more time, more energy, more interior space to work with. But the pressure rarely lifts on schedule. And meanwhile the fire gets lower and lower.
What eventually shifted things for me wasn’t a dramatic moment of return. It was a question: what if I’ve been approaching this backwards? What if the point isn’t what I take out — but what I bring in?
I had made myself a spectator. Grading the experience, waiting to be moved, measuring whether it was working. And spectators, by definition, are not participants. Nothing feeds you when you’re sitting in the back row with your arms crossed.
So during one of those flat stretches I tried a different posture. I came to give thanks rather than waiting to be fed. I paid attention to the small ordinary moments of the week rather than holding out for something dramatic. Sometimes I did nothing at all — just sat in the quiet without trying to manufacture a feeling or prove to myself that it was working. If something moved me, I received it. If I left without feeling changed, I let that be enough.
Here’s what I’ve learned at this stage: the dry seasons don’t stop coming. But I know now that abandoning the interior life in the middle of one is like dropping your umbrella in the rain because you’re already wet. The practices that sustain us aren’t the reward for getting through hard seasons. They are how we get through them.
Tend the fire. Even when — especially when — you don’t feel like it.