In the Presence of Absence

There is a phrase that keeps opening rather than closing: in the presence of absence. It does not behave like an idea. It behaves more like weather – something you stand inside, something that alters perception without asking permission.

Absence is usually treated as lack. As failure. As something to be corrected, filled, resolved. Yet life is shaped as much by what withdraws as by what appears. What goes quiet. What ceases. What no longer flows. Absence is not empty. It is structuring.

We live in a society trained to attend to saturation. To what is visible, audible, asserted. Attention is pulled toward the figure rather than the ground, the inkblot rather than the white that gives it form. The event rather than the silence that makes it legible.

Even the language reveals the bias. Negative space. As if what withdraws were inherently undesirable. As if absence were already a problem before it had been perceived. Language does not merely describe reality – it trains attention. It tells the eye where not to rest.

This bias runs through body, psyche, land, and season.

In trauma, absence from sensation is not a failure of presence but an act of survival – the nervous system stepping away from what cannot be borne. In illness, presence becomes unavoidable, narrowed, claustrophobic – a body that can no longer be left. In death, the body is absent entirely, yet presence remains, redistributed into memory, posture, habit, and the lives of others.

In the womb, when menstruation ceases, absence is often framed as loss. Yet nothing has disappeared. The work has changed. Blood no longer leaves the body. Time gathers inward. Heat, attention, and orientation reorganise. This is absence as maturation, not erasure.

And on the land, absence is winter.

Winter is not the absence of life. It is the absence of noise. Colour withdraws. Sound thins. Growth slows. The world becomes legible in structure rather than display. Bone rather than bloom. This is not a theatrical season. It is a foundational one.

We are in the pause between descent and ascent – not the fall, not the rise, but the still point where what has been encountered settles into coherence. This phase is consistently misread. It is not stagnation. It is integration.

Modern society has little patience for this interval. Or rather, it has language for it, but the language is pejorative: unproductive, empty, negative. So winter is experienced – internally and externally – as something to endure rather than inhabit.

Yet nothing that grows does so without this pause. Seeds do not decide to grow upward. They respond to orientation – gravity, moisture, temperature. The most important movements happen underground. By the time the first leaves appear, the ascent is already underway.

Appearance is not the beginning. It is the announcement that something has been happening for a long time.

This is why spring belongs to air. To communication. To exchange. The moment something becomes visible, it is already in dialogue. “I am here.” “I have crossed.” “I can be met.”

Which brings us to language itself.

If winter is the season of inner order, spring is the season of articulation. And articulation depends on the quality of language available. When language thins, perception follows. When vocabulary collapses into shorthand and slogan, nuance disappears. Everything becomes either positive or negative, desirable or deficient.

This collapse is particularly visible in contemporary wellness culture, where borrowed language circulates faster than thought. Words are repeated because they sound reassuring, not because they are perceptually or psychologically accurate. One such word has become especially revealing: container.

Gatherings, circles, retreats, and workshops are routinely described as containers – as if enclosure were synonymous with trust, depth and safety, and holding were synonymous with sealing. The intention may be benign. The structure is not.

A container is a closed system. It holds by limiting movement. It keeps things in and keeps things out. Coffins are containers. Sarcophagi are containers. Pressure cookers are containers.

Closed systems pressurise.

From a seasonal perspective, this language is already at odds with the work it claims to support. Winter does not hold by sealing. It holds by slowing, quieting, composting, withdrawing excess. Integration happens not in sealed chambers, but in permeable ground.

This matters because the most critical phase of any genuine inner work is not the experience itself, but what follows. Integration is not an optional extra. It is the work. Every rite of passage worth the name includes not only descent and immersion, but return.

Frameworks that rely on enclosure rather than permeability confuse protection with resolution. They offer comfort without orientation. Experience without metabolisation. They remove the immediate stimulus rather than preparing the body and psyche to meet life again with agency.

A container ends.

A vessel carries forward.

A vessel implies porosity. Exchange. The ability to dip in and out, to return and re-enter, to let meaning migrate slowly into muscle, habit, and choice. Vessels assume continuation, not completion.

Without structures that support return – gradual re-entry, testing, choice – the work does not root. It remains intact only inside the enclosure, collapsing the moment daily life resumes.

This is not a semantic argument. It is a seasonal and psychological one.

During the pandemic, a story circulated widely and was received with uncritical enthusiasm: a women-only village, described as a refuge for survivors of sexual violence, framed as safety through exclusion. What was striking was not the impulse toward sanctuary, but the assumptions embedded in the framing.

The implication was twofold: first, that sexual violence is inflicted solely by men upon women – a false and culturally convenient narrative that erases other realities; and second, that segregation itself constitutes healing. Both assumptions simplify complexity in order to feel safe, and in doing so, bypass the actual work of integration.

Removing all potential triggers is not integration. It is avoidance. A system that heals by eliminating contact with the wider world creates a closed loop. Inside it, there may be relief. But healing does not complete itself there. It begins at the point of return – when the nervous system meets life again and discovers whether anything has actually changed. This is the phase modern wellness industry repeatedly neglects.

Integration is the hinge between winter and spring. The quiet phase where what has been encountered reorganises itself before emergence. It cannot be rushed, sealed, or outsourced.

Winter understands this. Seeds are not held in sealed chambers. They are held in soil – porous, breathing, in constant exchange. Integration happens underground, before anything appears. Spring does not reward enclosure. It reveals whether the pause was inhabited honestly.

Language matters here not because it is mystical, but because it is structural. Words organise expectation. Expectation organises posture. Posture organises experience. When we choose language that implies closure, we structure experiences that end abruptly. When we choose language that allows permeability, we create conditions for return.

To live in the presence of absence is not to lack. It is to see differently. To allow what withdraws to inform what is forming. To refuse language that diminishes complexity. To choose words that leave room for breath, movement, and return.

Nothing alive emerges well from coffins, cages, or sealed rooms. What grows needs space.

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© 2026 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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