Of Winter: A Dialogue

When you start tuning in to winter, you realise that we live through a thousand winters in our lives--some big, some small.

From Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. My review:

Sometimes you find yourself reading a book so full of interesting, exciting ideas that the author has found a way to express so clearly and exquisitely that they are both familiar and revelatory, that the book continuously sparks moments of resonant discovery so that you find yourself stopping to have your own related ideas, pondering your own life in light of the new perspectives just gained from the reading, marking passages to revisit, taking notes to develop later, and by the end you are bursting so full of ideas, a mix of the author's and your own, that you just have to write or speak or sing or paint or in some way express them for the joy of it. This is one of those books. I was perhaps particularly receptive to it right now because it is--if there is such a thing--a perfect book for a pandemic, for this winter especially when life is so far from normal for so many of us.

In this series of essays, May explores the idea of winter in both a literal and figurative sense as something to embrace. Winter is a weather season, but also times in our lives of hardship, of illness, job loss, depression, disaster, mourning. It is those times we are struggling and suffering, in ways big and small, that interrupt the normal course of things. May uses nature as inspiration to orient herself to a new attitude toward winter. It is not a bleak and barren thing to avoid at all costs and hide from others in shame, but an unavoidable and necessary part of life. While not entirely enjoyable, winter is still a time of rest and recuperation, subtle growth and productivity; while maybe not something to embrace with excitement, periods of winter should be accepted as normal and healthy. It is a time of transformation and opportunity.

The essays are a mix of memoir and philosophy. May's project was spurred by a quick succession of events that threw her life into disarray: her husband had a serious illness, she had a serious illness, her six-year-old needed to be pulled from school, and she left her job. She relates these events, along with previous periods of winter in her life such as losing her voice, and reflects on them. She also uses her new found time to make a series of explorations into winter in other ways: traveling to see the northern lights, joining the solstice celebration at Stonehenge, cold-water swimming, a trip to Iceland, bee hibernation, New Year rituals, wolves and their mythology, literature, and more. She interviews experts in various winter-related areas and makes new friends. Through all of this, May learns to see--to know--winter in a new way. She shares her wisdom and insight with readers with writing that is clear and intimate and enjoyable, and that leads them to reflections of their own.

It is a book for comfort and meditation.

Nature shows that survival is a practice. Sometimes it flourishes--lays on fat, garlands itself in leaves, makes abundant honey--and sometimes it pares back to the very basics of existence in order to keep living. It doesn't do this once, resentfully, assuming that one day it will get things right and everything will smooth out. It winters in cycles, again and again, forever and ever. It attends to this work each and every day. For plants and animals, winter is part of the job. The same is true for humans.

To get better at wintering, we need to address our very notion of time. We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical. I would not, of course, seek to deny that we gradually grow older, but while doing so, we pass through phases of good health and ill, of optimism and deep doubt, of freedom and constraint. There are times when everything seems easy, and times when it all seems impossibly hard. To make that manageable, we just have to remember that our present will one day become a past, and our future will be our present. We know that because it's happened before. The things that trouble us now will one day be past history. Each time we endure the cycle, we ratchet up a notch. We learn from the last time around, and we do a few things better this time; we develop tricks of the mind to see us through. This is how progress is made. But one this is certain: we will simply have new things to worry about. We will have to clench our teeth and carry on surviving again.

In the meantime, we can deal only with what's in front of us at this moment in time. We take the next necessary action, and the next. At some point along the way, that next action will feel joyful again.

Clearly the book spoke to me. It advocates for ideas I agree with and have sometimes had in other forms before. The main point is something I believe in. Many secondary points, and my ideas spurred by them, follow.

I said early in this pandemic, and have repeated it throughout the course of the past year, that we should all just agree to take a year off from large aspects of life. That we should let go of all but the essential things. Even more than we already have with our sheltering in place and working from home. A year's break from school for all the young instead of virtual school. No programs at all at the library instead of virtual ones. We've tried to find remote ways to continue life as much as possible, tried to find ways of carrying on as normal without the physical contact and proximity. I think it would have been better to  not try to come up with so many new ways of doing things, or to try to imitate normalcy with replacement methods where possible, and just accept this as a period of wintering that is not normal, to be replaced by spring only when it is time.

From May:

As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. Instead we are in the habit of imaging our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. 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.

And:

That strange period between Christmas and New Year, when time seems to muddle, and we find ourselves asking again and again, What day is it? What date? I always mean to work on these days, or at least to write, but this year, like every other, I find myself unable to gather up the necessary intent. I used to think that these were wasted days, but I now realise that's the point. I am doing nothing very much, not even actively being on holiday. . . . I am not being lazy. I'm not slacking. I'm just letting my attention shift for a while, away from the direct ambitions of the rest of my year. It's like revving my engines.

Of course, I realize it takes some measure of privilege to advocate for this. Some situations are so precarious that no kind of break is possible as a matter of survival.

Speaking of holidays, in the past I have spent many visiting my parents . . . 

Often during this pandemic I've felt a particular restlessness involving my house. I used to notice when I would spend a few days visiting my parents at their house that I could enjoy a different type of relaxation than anywhere else, I think particular to the fact that it was a familiar environment with safe people unlike visiting other places, because I had left all of my responsibilities at home and I didn't have the pressure of things to clean or fix or take care of or look after, and could just let all of those thoughts go. The past year, working from home more than away from it, I have spent more time in my house than ever before, reminded by it of all the things I have not yet mustered the time or energy or finances to address. Sometimes the highlight of my day is running errands, driving through the pharmacy window for refills or making a curbside pickup at Target or getting a few groceries at Costco, just to have a few minutes of escape from all the unfinished tasks that constantly accuse me of sloth in my usual surroundings.

[I have kept myself so busy with life that] 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, and I have been helpless in the face of it. . . . 

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. The windows are clouded with the dusty veil of a hundred rainstorms. The varnish is wearing from the floorboards. The walls are dotted with nails that are missing their pictures or holes that should be filled and painted over. Even the television hangs at a drunken angle. When I stand on a chair and empty the top shelf in the wardrobe, I find that I have meant to replace the bedroom curtains at least three times in the last few years, and every bundle of fabric I've bought has ended up folded neatly and stowed away, entirely forgotten.

My wife and I are at a similar place May was when she wrote that, just having come through seven years of raising young children while working full time. Sometimes just keeping up with everything can be so all-consuming that the main goal is survival and things like house maintenance go entirely unaddressed. So, largely, entropy wins. Relaxing can be particularly challenging when you feel like everything you look at is a reminder of work to be done. But you have to learn to affirm that messy, decaying state of things as acceptable and do your best to go with it, being satisfied with getting what small things done that you can.

I wrote above that most of the thoughts in this post are familiar, and many have even appeared in other shapes previously on this blog. A thought from May:

Life is, by its very nature, uncontrollable. . . . 

Some ideas are too big to take in once, and completely. For me, this is one of them. Believing in the unpredictability of my place on this earth--radically and deeply accepting it to be true--is something I can do only in fits and starts. It is in itself an exercise in mindfulness. I remind myself of its force, but the belief soon seeps away. I remind myself again. It drifts off with the tide. This does nothing to diminish the power of the next realisiation, and the next. I am willing to do it over and over again, throughout my life. I am willing to accept that it may never actually stick.

I've often looked at an artist's work and thought, they're painting the same thing over and over. Writers, too; sometimes it seems like a number of their books are the same story retold in a slightly different guise. I know I do the same with my posts on this blog. I keep sharing the same thoughts again and again. We all do it on social media. I think it's due at least in part to what May describes above. We're reminding ourselves, sometimes daily, of thoughts, feelings, and ideas that are slippery or, as she says, so big it's hard to fully grasp them all at once. So we keep revisiting them over and over. If they won't stick or keep sinking out of conscious awareness, then we just have to keep cycling them back to the top of our attention.

An old Facebook post:

It seems I say this every time, but tonight's sunset has to be the best one ever.

Religious worship is the same dynamic. We go back time after time, often on a regular basis, to refresh our spirits and to keep pushing those values to the top of our awareness. And many spiritual needs can be met by nature just as much from worship services.

I even wonder if this dynamic is a healthy aspect to confirmation bias. Yes, it's a bias that keeps us from being open to difference and otherness, but perhaps we don't always seek out the familiar to exclude so much as to keep confirming our identities. Perhaps.

Today I am attending a workshop about reframing aging. Our culture takes a negative stance toward getting older and the state of being elderly. Many other cultures have a deep respect for old age, reverence for the accompanying wisdom and experience and accomplishments. We need to learn how to be similar.

A thought from May:

Today's Halloween . . . reflects what we secretly think--that death is a surrender to decay that makes us monsters.

And a related one that veers in a little different direction:

Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Halloween, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life. We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or reputational, so that we won't be forgotten, But ghost stories show us a different concern, hidden under our bluster: we hope that the dead won't forget us. We hope that we, the living, will not lose the meanings that seem to evaporate when our loved ones die.

Part of my self-selected work at my library is involvement in the Local Writers initiative. It started with my interest in connecting with our local children's and teen authors, the published ones, to connect them with readers. When I saw that our adult services people where doing similar work, I asked to join their committee to see how we might complement each other and to make sure young people were represented in the larger efforts and events. That committee's work, that I am now a part of, instead of published authors, focuses far more on providing support and opportunities to aspiring writers. I've noticed that the vast majority of people who come to us with an interest in becoming writers, in producing writing fit to share with others, are elderly. Most often they write stories about their lives, people or moments or memories from the past. I'm sure some of it is due to factors like empty nests and retirement, to having the luxury of time to work on it, but I think it's also part of a more general dynamic of growing older, of having a legacy and of wanting to share it.

I was aware of that dynamic when I was younger, that becoming older seems to synchronize with a growing desire to be a storyteller, to investigate genealogy and family history, to find one's place in a lineage and pass it on to the next generations, but I never fully respected it. I felt it a selfish desire, to have a legacy and be remembered as important and talked about after you were gone. It seemed somehow arrogant or egotistical, an inflation of self. Lately I've gained a new respect for the desire. It might be related to life in a pandemic, being more confronted than normally by the possibility of approaching death. I'm sure even more it's related to having children later in life, wondering every day how long I'll be around for them, with no living grandparents and no immediate family living near to be part of their regular lives. I feel the press of time to help them know their own stories, to realize they are part of families and have people they belong to, and to help them know the parts of their father they won't appreciate until they are older. I think there is also a sense that, now that I am older, I finally have enough knowledge and wisdom to finally have worthwhile things to pass on, to preserve beyond momentary and incidental interactions so that they can be revisited later. I've mentioned a few times in the past year a gradually emerging desire to be a writer. I wonder if this might be where it's coming from.

Everything is more at night.

What do I worry about during these long nights? Money. Death. Failure. The familiar horsemen of those quiet apocalypses that happen only when the sun's gone down. In the middle of the night, I can worry my house onto the edge of a cliff, forever about to topple onto the rocks below. I am only ever a missed wage packet away from total annihilation. I carry too much debt. I own nothing. I own too much. One day the bedroom ceiling will crash in from the weight of all the junk I have in the loft above. The central heating makes an odd noise at this time of night, and I swear the pump is on its last legs. I should wake H and make him listen to it, to see if he agrees. It could be spewing carbon monoxide into the bedroom as we lie here, oblivious. Whole families die like that--quietly, in the night. After H's appendicitis, I find it hard to shake the feeling that I could lose him one day. How sudden it could all be. And what would I do then? I have nothing to show for my forty-odd years on this earth except for a pile of dusty books. . . . 

In the dark, I am struck by a dyspeptic bout of conservatism. I should have a savings account containing a year's salary. I should have proper life insurance. I have squandered something, somehow. I am 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.

Shared because her willingness to be vulnerable in writing lets the rest of us know we are not alone in having the same experience.

Or, as Lemony Snicket puts it:

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake someone else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

It's a favorite one I've shared numerous times.

I'm watching it snow out the window right now. Forecasts had called for cooler temperatures and rain today, but instead it's gone below freezing and the world is slowly turning white. I'm delighted. Last week, in a reverse scenario, I posted to Facebook: All this wasted rain that could have been snow. If we're going to have to deal with cold and gloomy, we ought to at least be rewarded with fluffy and fun instead of wet and drippy. Of course, winter involves snow. From May, remembering her youth:

I was enthralled by the severity of our winter, its astonishing powers of change. I wanted it never to end.

I still retain a little of that attitude towards the snow. Try as I might, I can't produce the adult hardness towards a snowfall, full of resentment at the inconvenience. I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recolouring of the world into sparkling white, they say that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purplish clouds that loom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow. Heading out in a snowstorm to catch the flakes on my gloves, I love the feelings of it fresh underfoot. I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow. It swings me into reverse gear.

Snow creates that quality of awe in the face of a power greater than ours. It epitomises the aesthetic notion of the sublime, in which greatness and beauty couple to overcome you--a small, frail human--entirely.

I live where we only get decent snow a few times a year, so I'm sure the rarity increases its value. Nevertheless, I love a good snowstorm. Even the disruption. And not just watching one through the window. I love the challenge of heading out into snow to become a part of its greater power. To challenge myself to be worthy of it and to revel in its glory.

I have occasionally been tempted to drive [my son] to witness a snowfall in a nearby town or even in a neighbouring county, but I'm fairly certain that blizzard tourism counts as parental irresponsibility.

Hehe. I can relate.

A few shorter quotes from the book that I enjoy, starting with one related to the above.

Winter is the best season for walking, as long as you can withstand a little earache and are immune to mud.

I agree heartily, and have the experience to prove it.

Somewhere on the edge of my brain is a vague, slippery reaction to this, but I haven't been able to capture it.

Most of a bee's activity is directed towards its colony surviving the winter. They spend half the year preparing for it and half the year living it. Every April they emerge from their hive and start all over again.

I think it's related to that line from Station Eleven, the one on the back cover that the author shares as an overarching theme for her story: survival is insufficient.

Of course, as a librarian, I love this one:

They say we should dance like no one is watching. I think that applies to reading, too.

Read what you want, not for show.

And now a series of thoughts about shifting our orientation toward empathy and compassion and caring. It's an orientation that should be at the heart of our political and economic policies. We should always try to see ourselves in the suffering and unfortunate instead of, as we so often do, the opposite.

Here is another truth about wintering: you'll find wisdom in your winter, and once it's over, it's your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it's our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It's an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out. This may involve the breaking of a lifelong habit, one passed down carefully through generations: that of looking at other people's misfortunes and feeling certain that they brought them upon themselves in a way that you never would. This isn't just an unkind attitude. It does us harm, because it keeps us from learning that disasters do indeed happen and how we can adapt when they do. It stops us from reaching out to those who are suffering. And when our own disaster comes, it forces us into a humiliated retreat, as we try to hunt down mistakes that we never made in the first place or wrongheaded attitudes that we never held. Either that, or we become certain that there must be someone out there we can blame. Watching winter and really listening to its messages, we learn that effect is often disproportionate to cause; that tiny mistakes can lead to huge disasters; that life is often bloody unfair, but it carries on happening with or without our consent. We learn to look more kindly on other people's crises, because they are so often portents of our own future.

May does a wonderful reorientation of Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. The intended moral is that we should be like the industrious ants who always successfully work hard to prepare for the lean winter instead of like the Grasshopper who finds himself in need after spending the year at play. She, instead, encourages us to see ourselves in both.

[The ants] 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 ants are not real, not on a mass scale; they are an if only. If only everyone could be the ants. If only we were all so forward thinking and responsible. If only the grasshoppers of this world could be so simply dispatched.

I will give you an alternative if only. If only life were so stable, happy, and predictable as to produce ants instead of grasshoppers, year in, year out. The truth is that we all have ant years and grasshopper years--years in which we are able to prepare and save and years where we need a little extra help. 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.

We all have times when we need a little extra help. We should help others happily and be able to expect the same in return. With no shame, blame, or stigma attached.

And, as we do so, we should always remember that caring for others gives our lives a sense of purpose, satisfaction, and meaning more than anything else does.

Usefulness is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don't think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us. We keep pets for the pleasure of looking after them; we voluntarily feed extra mouths and scoop up excrement in little plastic bags, declaring it relaxing. We channel our adoration towards the most helpless citizens of all--babies and children--for reasons that have nothing to do with their future utility. We flourish on caring, on doling out love. The most helpless members of our families and communities are what stick us together. It's how we thrive. Our winters are social glue.

As Tommy Ungerer puts it in Nonstop:

Vasco clutched Poco to his heart.

At last he had someone to care for.

Just in time.

We all have winters. May we all have someone to care for us and may we all have someone to care for.