5 Prompts to Fold Inward This Winter
Inspired by gratitude, silence, shadows, simplicity, and becoming—use these prompts to creatively nurture rest this season 😴 🛌🏻 🌙💤
Join me for The Winter Fold, a 5-week virtual retreat exploring creative rest through art, reflection, and connection. Starting January 19th, we’ll draw inspiration from Ross Gay, John Cage, Rainer Maria Rilke, and more to embrace winter’s invitation to fold inward. Each full-retreat enrollment includes an optional and free 1:1 coaching session. ou can also enroll in the retreat on a week-by-week basis :) All proceeds will go to mutual aid for Los Angeles fire relief.
Winter is a season of quiet transformation—a time to fold inward and listen.
This winter, however, feels louder than usual: fires continue to engulf Los Angeles, and intense astrological shifts mark the start of 2025. Amid this heaviness, folding inward isn’t an escape—it’s a radical act of rest. It’s a way to care for ourselves and our communities. Folding inward has never felt more vital.
Over the past 5ish years I’ve been working to rekindle intimacy with my creative practice, and the rhythms of winter have been a grounding force, helping me reconnect and find my way back. Each winter looks a little different, but it’s always rooted in the intention to pause striving and simply melt into being, listening, breathing. Last year, I took a week off work to do nothing but read. This year, I’ve been experimenting with my evenings—crafting an early bedtime ritual so irresistible that my restless mind can’t resist. How does my creative practice shift and change when I make room for rest? How can I infuse creativity into how I rest? How can I continue to engage with rest beyond the seasonal slow down? Winter offers me a chance to reengage with these questions.
Lately, I’ve been exploring the shapes of rest and revisiting themes in some of my favorite works of art to uncover new pathways for restoration. The result of this inquiry is The Winter Fold, a virtual retreat that kicks off this Sunday, January 19th. Admittedly, I haven’t been great at marketing it… but that’s content for another Substack.
Inspired by the themes of the programming, here are five prompts to help you begin folding inward this winter 🤍
1. Practice Gratitude: Pause for joy
Create a catalog of gratitude. This could be a Google Slides document, a Notion page, in your Notes app, audio recordings, or a simple pocket journal. Capture small moments of joy. What made you smile today? Capture it. Write it down. Roll it around in your mind like a hard candy. Let it become an anchor.
Folding inward starts with noticing. In The Book of Delights and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay reminds us that gratitude is a muscle, not a reflex. It’s an intentional practice of paying attention—of delighting in the small, the quiet, the overlooked. His work asks us to stop and savor, even when life feels impossibly heavy, even when joy arrives tangled with grief. Gratitude, Gay teaches us, is radical. It’s an act of care for ourselves and the world.
2. Embrace Silence: Pause for quiet
Set a timer for an extended period of time. This could be 4 minutes and 33 seconds… or 5 minutes, or 10, or whatever. Sit in intentional silence. What do you hear? In the room? Outside of your window? Within yourself?
Folding inward means listening deeply. For John Cage, silence wasn’t the absence of sound—it was the space for all sounds to exist without hierarchy. In 1952, Cage premiered 4'33”, a performance where he sat in complete stillness, allowing the rustle of programs, the hum of fluorescent lights, and even a sneeze from the audience to become the music. Silence, Cage believed, wasn’t empty; it was alive.
His work asks us to relinquish control, to hear the world as it is, not as we want it to be. When we do, we start to notice the strange orchestra of everyday life—the rhythms of our own breath, the clicking of the radiator, the way time expands and contracts in the quiet.
3. Explore Shadows: Pause for depth
What part of your life, work, or creative process feels like a shadow? Reflect on what you’ve been avoiding or hiding. How might this shadowy place hold beauty or even wisdom?
Folding inward requires looking where you usually don’t. In In Praise of Shadows, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki invites us to reconsider the beauty of what’s hidden, obscured, or dimly lit. He writes of lacquerware glistening faintly in candlelight, the way shadows lend depth and mystery to a space. To Tanizaki, modernity’s obsession with brightness blinds us to the quiet elegance of shadow.
Winter, with its long nights and low light, is a season for shadows. It asks us to sit with what we’d rather not see—imperfection, messiness, uncertainty—and to trust that these too have their own kind of beauty.
4. Welcome Simplicity: Pause for clarity
Consider the foundational grid lines of your life. What runs horizontally? What runs vertically? Are these physical items? Habits? Routines? Ideas? Of these grid lines, what feels most important? Which feel outdated or unnecessary? What can you let go of to create more space for clarity and peace?
Folding inward creates space. Agnes Martin understood this deeply. Her minimalist grids and soft, repetitive lines weren’t about rigidity but about freedom—freedom to see beauty in restraint, peace in simplicity. She described her work as an expression of joy, a joy so quiet it almost disappeared.
Martin reminds us that simplicity isn’t about removing everything; it’s about removing what no longer serves. It’s not a cold emptiness but a warm clarity, like the air after a storm.
5. Surrender to Becoming: Pause for trust
What’s one question you’re living in right now? Instead of rushing to answer, let it be enough. Sit with it. How might it be shaping you?
Folding inward allows transformation. Becoming isn’t a straight line—it’s messy and nonlinear, like the way rivers carve new paths over time. In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke urges us to live in the questions rather than rushing to answers. He writes: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.”
Winter is the perfect season to embrace this patience. It asks us to trust that something is quietly unfolding within us, even if we can’t yet name it.
These questions and prompts are at the heart of The Winter Fold, a 5-week virtual retreat centering creative rest. Want more? Join us starting January 19th to explore these themes in a transformative, intimate space.
Thanks for reading! If you have or start a Substack, lmk 😎
xErica 🦋
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