Wintering: How I learned to flourish when life became frozen

by Katherine May

I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in:

my house – my beloved home – has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner,

There’s not a single soothing place left in the house, where you can rest a while without being reminded that something needs to be mended or cleaned.

Before I sit down, I’ve developed the habit of opening the back door to sniff the air for a few moments.

In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of hysterectomies, chattering companionably in a language I don’t understand. They are a glimpse of life yet to come: a message of survival, passed on through the generations.

There is a time after the aftermath. *

endowment of permission

the pleasure of a sad film.

in sauna,

a state of being.

I’m fairly certain that my decision not to have a second child rests squarely on my worship of sleep.

In the intimacy of the darkness, families and lovers could hold deep, rich, roaming conversations that had no place in the busy daytime.

There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, and its invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams.

‘Druids follow the eight-fold Wheel of the Year,’ he says, ‘which means that we have something to do every six weeks. It’s a useful period of time – you always have the next moment in sight. It creates a pattern through the year.’

Is this an invented religion, cobbling together borrowed rituals, and harking back to an imagined past where mysticism reigned? Probably. Maybe. But I don’t think it matters.

‘Yes, I pray,’ she replies to herself, ‘earthwise rather than to any off-ground god

I learned to meditate over a decade ago now, and when motherhood made it sometimes impossible to find the time to sit for twenty minutes, twice a day, I found a way to distil a little of that experience. By closing my eyes, however briefly, and resting my thoughts on the core of my perception, I can gain some of the peace that meditation brings me. I have come to think of it as prayer, although I ask for nothing, and speak to no one within it. It is a profoundly non-verbal experience, a sharp breath of pure being amid a forest of words. It is an untangling, a moment to feel the true ache of desire, the gentle wash of self-compassion, the heart-swell of thanks, the tick tick tick of existence. It is a moment when, alone, I feel at my most connected with others. I can feel entirely separate in a crowd of people, but closing my eyes, I can feel as though I have walked into a river of all consciousness, bathed in common humanity.

‘Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer/utters itself’

being part of the effort to mark the passing of another phase in the year,

perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year

What he needed was a riot. What he needed was for me to rise up and say, ‘You know what? This isn’t good enough! My son deserves to be happy!’

Some winters creep up on us so slowly that they have infiltrated every part of our lives before we truly feel them.

I can’t effect the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I can sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside of your normal habits.

‘I’m still not the same as someone without a diagnosis in the first place. This has been a long journey for me, and swimming is just one of the changes I’ve made. I’ve cut out sugar, I make sure I get plenty of alone time, I go on long walks, and I’ve stopped saying yes to everybody. I’ve cut down my working hours. All of these things make a buffer, and I say I like to keep my buffer broad. Sometimes problems come up that narrow my buffer, and then I have to make sure I build it up again. Keeping well is almost a full-time job. But I have a wonderful life.’

Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up enough resources to cope with the grasshopper years, but in believing that each grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

A honeybee colony consists of something in the region of 30,000 to 40,000 bees – one queen, a few hundred male drones, and tens of thousands of female worker bees, plus many more eggs and larvae. The sole role of the drones is to mate with the queen early in her life, after which time she stores millions of sperm in her body and uses this to lay around 2,000 fertilised eggs per day. The workers carry out all the other tasks, working through a defined roster of roles at different stages in their lives. When they are young, they keep the hive clean, and then they graduate to a succession of other duties, depending on their experience and expendability: they tend to larvae and young bees; they look after the queen; they put nectar into the cells, make wax to produce new honeycomb, make the honey itself, and serve as guard bees. The final role of their lives is to go out foraging, because this is the most dangerous task of all, and older bees are expendable. We probably only ever see ancient bees, sent out on risky missions to gather nectar for carbs and pollen for protein. Al says that you can tell the age of a bee by the intensity of its sting – the older bees have far more potent venom. It seems only fair, given the risks they have to take. The way that bees achieve this carefully balanced social order is by behaving like cells in a larger body. ‘You or I,’ says Al, ‘have bodies that regulate themselves. We don’t even have to think about all the things that keep us alive; t...

Plath’s instincts towards keeping her hands moving in the winter turned out to be correct. A 2007 study by Harvard Medical School found that knitting can lower blood pressure as much as yoga and can also help to relieve sufferers of chronic pain by releasing serotonin. In 2018, the charity Knit for Peace conducted research on the health benefits of crafting, and found that it had a range of benefits for their members, including maintaining mental sharpness, helping smokers to quit and reducing loneliness and isolation in the elderly. They went on to argue that craft should be prescribed on the NHS.

Change will not stop happening. The only part we can control is our response.

These people might as well be leaning into my face, shouting, Cope! Cope! Cope! while spraying perfume into the air to make it all seem nice. The subtext of these messages is clear: misery is not an option.

A great deal of life will always suck.

we need to perform those functions for ourselves: to give ourselves a break when we need it, and to be kind.

When I started feeling the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable, and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed, and made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air, and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself: what is this winter all about? I asked myself: what change is coming?

We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical.

we do a few things better this time;

There will come a time when there’s no longer any point in clinging on to them, and I’ll be able to whittle them down to the kernel of what I truly love. It will be like shedding a skin.

The Gaelic festival of Imbolc is held on the first day of February, and is associated with dusting away the cobwebs that have grown in the corners during the darkest months.

a duty to share it.