When you and the silence become friends, it will speak to you as loudly as anything you could ever hear from the outer world. Soon you will not be able to ignore its voice, which after all is the voice of your own spirit calling to you.
Plants and animals don't fight the winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that's where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.