Are you wintering?
Here’s a thought-provoking word: wintering.
I enjoyed reflecting on Katherine May’s words in my recently-read Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
She describes it as those moments when life turns cold through crisis or loss and we find ourselves living at a different, slower pace. Wintering is a process by which our bodies and souls seek rest and recuperation when life has become dark or dreary.
This is a returning awareness for me, and I may be foolishly hoping to get back to the life and energy of my summer, internally fighting winter, if you will.
But as Katherine May points out:
“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 they lived in the summer.They prepare.They adapt. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.“
“It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting our house in order. Doing these rather unfashionable things – slowing down, letting our spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting – is essential.“
As humans, we have (and need to have!) our fallow seasons, whether physical, spiritual, or emotional.
However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary and often lonely, but it comes for all of us. We can choose to embrace the uncertainty and the possibilites for growth that exist in the liminal spaces of winter…the places between what once was and what will be later, between “the mundane and the magical.”
Katherine May tells us that “We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”
“No doubt the winter will still have plenty of remaining bite; the coldest days are yet to come. Still there will be snowdrops peeking up within weeks, and then the first crocuses. It won’t be long.”
The year begins again!
And so can we!
1 Comment
Pat, Thanks for this reminder. Where Jim and I live now, in a senior independent living place, I hear some of my neighbors bemoaning the cold days and the snow and ice outside our windows. I suggest that we can still enjoy the beauty of it. After all, most of them won’t go outside for days at a time. So I go on wintering by myself. I love the winter!