A Portal Between Worlds: Winter in Montreal

(From the series: Pilgrimage to the In-Between: Journeys Through Soul and Soil)

There’s something about Montreal in winter that feels like standing inside a doorway between worlds.

Maybe it’s the language—how easily people move between French and English, as if no translation is ever truly needed. Maybe it’s the season—how the heavy snow muffles sound and softens light, turning city streets into something dreamlike. Maybe it’s the feeling that here, in the coldest, darkest time of the year, life doesn’t retreat; it transforms.

I go to Montreal not just for the culture, the jazz, the charcuterie, or the majesty of a frozen mountaintop. I go because it reminds me how to live in the spaces between things: between endings and beginnings, between light and dark, between solitude and celebration.

There, amidst antique glass windows frosted with snow, French words curling like smoke through cafés, and the glow of winter lights against stone buildings, I remember that the in-between is not a place to fear. It’s a place to breathe, ground, dream, and reset.

I went at the end of each year, when everything was still, quiet, suspended. I walked through deep snowbanks to sit in coffee shops where conversations hum softly in French. I ordered café au lait and practiced my intermediate grammar with baristas who indulged my efforts with warmth and kindness. There’s no pretentiousness there; there’s warm Canadian affection.

I hiked up Mont Royal while snow fell in thick, silent flakes. At the top, the city stretched below me like a memory held in crystal. I sledded down the hill laughing like a child, the cold burning my face, joy waking me from within.

I visited the Insectarium and the Biodôme, where a recreated rainforest steams with life despite the deep freeze outside. I ate cheese and charcuterie at Jean-Talon Market, amazed by the fresh produce grown in greenhouses even in midwinter. I sipped craft beer in a tiny dark bar and watch snow fall through frozen windows, feeling both entirely present and slightly outside of time.

I listened to live jazz at Upstairs Jazz Bar & Grill and Dièse Onze, where the music swirled around me like incense, grounding me in my body and lifting me into something larger.

Montreal reminds me that beauty lives in the threshold. That art, language, nature, and food can be forms of devotion. That life doesn't stop in the dark—it glows.

It is a city that speaks to the soul in more than one language.

And it is a place I return to whenever I need to remember how to stand, fully alive, in the in-between.

Because some pilgrimages don’t require planes or passports. Just a snowy road, a quiet heart, and a willingness to be touched, moved even, by beauty.

And in Montreal—in the hush of snow, the warmth of a romantic language, the swirl of saxophones and steam—I find myself again: present and glowing with the winter lights, the landscape, and her people.