Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

by Katherine May

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else.

Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.

Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.

However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.

Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.

We must learn to invite the winter in.

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.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things – slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting – are radical acts these days, but they are essential.

Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you’re already doing everything?

everybody else is drowsing while I am wide awake and hounded by sharp fears.

I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this; whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.

I have used up all my energy just to see this, and it’s worth it. But how could I ever justify that to the outside world? How could I ever admit that I chose the muffled roar of starlings over the noisy demands of the workplace?

I’m not the only one who has forgotten how to rest.

In moments of helplessness, I always seem to travel north.

After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?

true ghost story: quiet and crisply written, eerie rather than horrific, and finding its meaning in liminality.

How is it that we can code so carefully the weight of loss, grief, time and continuity into our children’s books, but forget them so thoroughly ourselves?

the looming threat of the institution.

Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.

coming away with nothing other than shame at my own ability to malinger.

I don’t like the way that four o’clock in the afternoon can feel so desolate,

Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, stepping into the garden to see bright stars on a clear night, the roar of the wood-burning stove, and the accompanying smell of charred wood. It is warming the teapot and making cups of bitter cocoa; it is stews magicked from bones with dumplings floating like clouds. It is reading quietly, and passing away the afternoon twilight watching movies. It is thick socks and the bundle of a cardigan.

Winter is a season that invites me to rest well and feel restored, when I am allowed to retreat and be quietly separate.

But sunlight is one of the key ways in which we synthesise vitamin D, along with eating oily fish (another declining habit), eggs and meat, and supplementing it through fortified foods and vitamin pills. The British winter months, from October to March, have never contained enough UVB radiation to enable the production of vitamin D, but many of us are no longer getting enough in the summer, either, and our children are beginning to feel the effects. A clinical review paper by Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham, published in the BMJ in January 2010, found that there has been a resurgence in childhood rickets, the disease that causes weak, soft bones and perhaps even skeletal deformities.

Here was a group of people who were willing to share their chosen place of worship, and to respect each other’s mode of celebration. They didn’t seek the bullying voice of consistency or conformity; they didn’t denounce each other as following a divergent path. They just did their thing, and let others do theirs.

I, too, am saddled with that: the sense that, rather than being immoral, dangerous or stupid, the creation of rituals to find deeper meaning in the world is simply cringeworthy.

‘I tune in to winter now at Samhain, knowing that in six weeks’ time I’ve got the solstice, and then in another six weeks, I’m moving into spring. I’ve got three markers.’

Praying is something that I can do, and so I do it. It seems to represent an atavistic impulse on my part, a desire to find life in the world around me, the trees and stones and bodies of water, the birds and mammals that enter my line of sight. Mine is a personal animism, hushed by my conscious brain, nurtured by my unconscious.

For my own part, they open up a space in which to host thoughts that I would otherwise find silly or ridiculous: that voiceless awe at the passing of time. The way everything changes. The way everything stays the same. The way those things are bigger than I am, and more than I can hold.

More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on either way, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition – perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year – we can get the measure of it. If we resist the instinct to endure those darkest moments alone, we might even make the opportunity to share the burden, and to let a little light in.

That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need.

‘This is the shape of a good story,’ I say. ‘This is the beginning, and the end. And in the middle, see, is always the lowest point. It’s called the nadir: the moment when things have got so bad that you just can’t imagine a way out.’

But, for the first time in my life, the boundary between December and January begins to feel a little less arbitrary, linked to the return of the light, and the promise of spring.

began to absorb the connection between beauty and hardiness that existed in this freezing place; the way that these people worked hard to maintain their contract with the sublime.

including being asked to prove ownership of the lands on which they have subsisted since time immemorial.

Theirs is an animistic faith, based on the idea that souls can reside in a range of things: animals, plants and landscape features are often prominent subjects for animism.

pregnancy made me feel as though I was missing some defence or other, and I couldn’t fight for myself. The

the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside of your normal habits.

Here was yet another liminal space, a crossing point between the mundane and the magical. Winter, it seems, is full of them: fleeting invitations to step out of the ordinary.

By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilient kept us afloat.

Whichever way you look at it, the ants are mean and sanctimonious, possibly also genocidal.

The ants, meanwhile, are static. They are the simple, upstanding citizens who behave themselves. They save for rainy days, instead of relying on the handouts of others. They keep themselves to themselves, and look after their own. They are a projection of how we so often think we ought to live, but also a model for a life we’ve collectively failed to achieve, over and over again, across the entire history of humanity.

The idea of the human machine – a natural order of things that could function as smoothly as a beehive if only we could cut away the bad habits we’ve got into over the course of our existence on this earth – has long attracted many thinkers on both the Left and the Right. Whether your taste runs to military efficiency, with no space left for the whining neediness of individuals, or flat, egalitarian structures in which everyone gets what they need rather than what they want, then there’s a beehive metaphor for you.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Mussolini was fond of evoking the beehive to describe the ideal functioning of Fascism. ‘It is usual to speak of the Fascist objective as the “beehive state”, which does grave injustice to bees,’ wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier. ‘A world of rabbits ruled by stoats would be nearer the mark.’

Usefulness, in itself, is a useless concept when it comes to humans.

We are told to live within our means, but there are times when, frankly, I feel that ‘my means’ would be a caravan on waste ground. Instead, I suspect that most of us have periods of feast and famine in our lives, and, increasingly, we spend the feast years paying off the debts of the famine. It’s only money, as a friend of mine often says with a sigh.

But the works of winter are more intricate than the simple storing up of supplies, which are then run down until the summer replenishes them. Cooped up in our hives, with cold winds blasting at the roof, we are invited into the industry of the dark season, when there is nothing else to do but keep our hands moving. Winter is a time for the quiet arts of making: for knitting and sewing, baking and simmering, repairing and restoring our homes.

In summer I want big, splashy ideas and trashy novels, devoured in a garden chair, or perched on one of the wave-breaks on the beach. In winter I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight; slow, spiritual reading; a re-enforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries: the muffled quiet of book-stacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept, or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.

But she said, no, it wasn’t about singing. She thought that a good teacher could help me to nurture my voice back into health, and look after it in the future. Apparently it happens all the time in the performing arts: voices become frail and need restoring or remapping.

I would like to say that I do not still routinely joke that we should probably move into that caravan in the woods, because that’s the only thing we could reliably afford. Instead,