stick season

The soul has a home. I'm convinced of this now, though I couldn't have told you what that meant when I was younger. I thought home was just a place—a dot on a map, a house number, coordinates that anchored you to the earth. But now I understand that home is something more essential, more spiritual. It’s not always a place. But It's where your soul goes to exhale.

Actually, for me, there's a primary home, yes, but also these secondary homes scattered across my life like breadcrumbs leading me back to my source. One of them sits above the treeline in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, in that stark alpine world where the trees give up and only the hardiest things survive. I went to college in New England, and something about that landscape imprinted on me. Maybe it was the way everything up there is reduced to its essence—rock, wind, sky—with no room for pretense. Or maybe it was just the age I was, still forming, still figuring out which parts of myself were real and which were borrowed. To someone coming of age, the natural world seems to always leave its unyielding, indelible mark.

I'm writing this as a sermon of sorts to my own soul, because I need it, and maybe to yours too, if you need it. Because I feel us entering a season of challenge, a time when the leaves have fallen away and we're left staring at the bare scaffolding of our lives. The skeleton trees. The underlying structure we could ignore when everything was dressed in color. This is the winter for many people in my world, and in many ways, for myself.

You’ve probably heard the Noah Kahan song "Stick Season" that's been on the radio and rattling around in my head this week. Right now, it’s stick season in its prime.

If you don't know about it, stick season is that in-between time in New England—after the fall tourists leave but before the ski resorts open, when the leaves are gone and the snow hasn't come yet. Everything looks stripped, barren, and waiting. It’s like Mother Nature cruelly concocted a brief, one-of-a-kind season just to test those with clinical depression. It's not pretty in the postcard way. It's honest.

Noah’s song is a breakup song - it has nothing to do with what I’m telling you, but honestly, it doesn't matter. Art becomes what we need it to be. Because when I listen to it, I actually hear something beyond the heartache and melancholy. The music ironically connotes a warm, cozy time of year that I love. I hear a call to return. Stick season, to me, is about coming home—not necessarily to a place, but to yourself, to the people who know the truest version of you, to the home of the soul.

Think about it: when the cold really sets in, when winter stops being theoretical and starts being survival, what do we do? We gather. We hibernate together. We're drawn into close proximity with those who love us, huddled around whatever warmth we can create together. There's something ancient and animal about this, something that predates our modern ability to heat our homes to seventy-two degrees regardless of what's happening outside.

I know not everyone has this luxury. Not everyone has a warm hearth waiting, or people who will throw open the door when they arrive. Some of us have had to build our own shelters, find our own families, create home from scratch when the one we were born into wasn't safe. I see that. I acknowledge that the invitation to "come home" might sound hollow or even cruel if home was the place you had to leave in order to survive. If that's your story, maybe home for you is something you're still building, still discovering, still that’s earning the right for you to trust it.

All of that is equally valid. More than valid—it's real, and it matters.

But here's what I believe, what I'm trying to convince my own anxious heart of in this stick season of the soul: wherever home is for you, whoever those people are who see you clearly—it's time to let them in. It's time to stop pretending you can weather this alone.

There's something about our modern world that makes us believe we should be self-sufficient fortresses, that needing people is weakness, that coming home is somehow admitting defeat. We're supposed to be out there conquering, achieving, becoming. We're supposed to have it figured out. And so we stay away, we keep moving, we answer "fine" when people ask how we're doing, because to say anything else feels like too much vulnerability, too much truth for casual conversation. I assure you, this is the New England way, and yes, I have to concede there is something hardy, noble, and beautiful about that too.

But it’s a little bit of pretense if we are to be honest. And stick season doesn't care about our pretense. It strips that away too.

When I think about those alpine zones in the White Mountains, I remember how nothing survives up there by being tall and proud. The plants grow low to the ground. They bend. They know when to hunker down. They're adapted for harsh conditions not by being harder, but by being smarter about where they put their roots, about how they share resources, about when to stop reaching upward and start reaching toward each other.

Maybe that's the wisdom of this season. Maybe the call to come home isn't about giving up or giving in. Maybe it's about having the humility to admit we were made for connection, designed for intimacy, built to be known. Maybe it's about recognizing that strength sometimes looks like letting someone else stoke the fire while you rest.

Those who love you—they're waiting. They're keeping the porch light on. They're making space at the table. They see the bare trees of who you are and they don't look away. They know about stick season too. They've weathered their own winters. And they're ready to remind you of what you've forgotten: that you've survived before, that spring always comes, that you're stronger than you think and more loved than you know.

I can't promise you that winter won't be hard. I can't promise the anxious worry will disappear the moment you walk through the door. Coming home isn't a magic spell that fixes everything. But it is a preparation, a gathering of resources, a choosing of companionship over isolation.

And here's what I can guarantee: you are loved. Even if it doesn't feel like it right now. Even if the evidence seems thin. Even if you've convinced yourself otherwise. Somewhere, someone is holding space for you.

Your soul has a home. So remember to come home.

Let yourself be warmed by the fire. Let someone else carry some of the weight for a while. Let yourself remember who you are beneath all the shoulds and the striving.

The trees will leaf out again. They always do. But first, there's this: the honest season, the stripped-down time, the coming home.

Welcome back.

John

Thanks for reading The Mayfly Letter.

Your support allows me to continue doing something I truly love.

John Conrad