I’ve touched on winter-y topics before on this blog like winter skin care and hygge essentials but today we’re going to discuss the whole damn season.
Winter, that is.
One of my friends and fellow book club members recommended Wintering by Katherine May to our book club and I’m ready to talk about it… with everyone.
And everyone else wants to talk about it too, it seems. Even the GOOP podcast. Because it’s an incredibly prescient book for this literal season (Winter in the Northern Hemisphere) and also the metaphorical season (global pandemic).
What’s the book about?
It’s about Winter. Ms. May uses the concept as a metaphor to describe hard periods in our life. She takes various spiritual and physical investigations to look closer at what winter means to nature, to culture, to religion. From sauna to pickling to dormice to voice lessons to the Northern Lights, the topics range from readily understandable to surprising. It’s a deep but easy read and, as I told the Inner Circle in the January Secret Posts, I really wish someone had given me this book to read last May, so that I would have properly approached this pandemic winter with proper preparation and reverence.
Because that’s what this pandemic “season” is - a winter. A time of stillness and hibernation but also a preparation for the next cycle of life.
Ms. May gently encourages the reader to spend some time preparing for the winters in each of our lives; after we experience change, or trauma, or loss. Yes, we will feel pain or loneliness, but we’ll be better off for accepting that those times come… and then they go.
I have to quote the book here:
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.
For me, this brings to mind that beautiful piece of poetry from the Bible - one that I’ve gently reminded myself of when I’ve been in times of turmoil:
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.…
He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
Ms. May gives the reader examples of how cultures around the world have traditionally approached winter - starting to pickle and can fresh foods from summer, cutting firewood, ensuring machinery and shelters are in good order. And I’ll be honest, the idea of consciously preparing and creating a warm, rejuvenating cocoon for winter is an idea that has confused me.
I approach summer like this, not winter. I make sure my family has fresh bottles of sunscreen ready to go, that everyone has new flip flops that fit their growing feet, that our A/C hasn’t been making weird sounds.
In Texas, Summer is the season that can kill. Not Winter.
You see, winter, for Texans, appears accidentally. We stumble into it, year after year. The fall is one party after another, it’s Friday Night Football and Homecoming and Halloween, Thanksgiving and then the glitz and tinsel of the Christmas season and then January hits us and it’s oh so quiet.
What happens… next, we ask? We anxiously await the heat and brutality of summer but we do not know - or have forgotten - how to savor the winter we do have.
And on the one hand, that’s fine with me. But then when my husband and I talk of moving to the mountains he looks at me and asks, “what are you going to do when it gets cold? Like, really cold?”
He’s worried I won’t be able to take it.
I shrug him off. I don’t know if I’ll like the “really cold.” But I’m 98% sure I can survive it.
Especially after reading Wintering.
That sounds too good to be true. Maybe a little cheesy. But I really do feel like something shifted inside my brain after reading this book. Some broken and forgotten pieces of my evolutionary subconscious clicked together and I am reminded that… yes. Winter - and hard times - comes and then it will go. And we’re all going to be okay. Eventually. If we can stay warm and make nourishing foods and sauna and read good books.
We’ll be okay.
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