Lexie Carroll’s Reviews > Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times > Status Update

Like Brighde at Imbolc (Spring), we must emerge slowly from our wintering, unfurling our new leaves gradually. There will still be the debris of a long disordered season. These moments need the most grace, when we have to tell truths we’d rather ignore. Sometimes we will have to name our personal winters, and the words will feel barbed in our throats: grief, rejection, depression, illness. Shame, failure, despair.

If we don’t allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness then we miss an important cue to adapt. We live in an age when we’re bombarded with entreaties to be happy, but we’re suffering from an avalanche of depression. We need friends who wince along with our pain & tolerate our gloom…We need people who acknowledge that we can’t always hang on. That sometimes everything breaks.

“Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is in pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
-Alan Watts
Believing in the unpredictability of my place on the earth (radically & deeply accepting it to be true) is something I can only do in fits & starts…. Change will not stop happening.

Regarding Aesop’s fable of the hardworking ants and the grasshopper: we all have ant years where we’re able to sustain ourselves, save, be self-sufficient. We all also have grasshopper years: lean times where we need extra help & support. Our true flaw lies not in failing to store up extra resources, but in thinking that a grasshopper year is an anomaly, visited only on us, due to our unique human failings.

Perhaps sadness is a skill that’s been neglected by our culture. As adults we often must learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness; of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.

The Night can be a claimed, sacred space to metabolize the events of the waking hours. Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness. Winter offers a kind of night, where we can access our innate ability to digest difficult parts of life. Over & over again winter offers us liminal spaces to inhabit, yet still we refuse them. The work of the cold season is to learn to welcome them.

“In the dark I am struck by a dark bout of conservatism: I should have a years worth of savings, I should have life insurance. I have almost nothing to show for my 40-odd year’s time on this earth. I have squandered something somehow- I’m not sure what, or when, but I despise myself for it. The precariousness of my life bites me hard, I can feel its teeth in my gut. I am nothing; I am no one; I have failed.”