Wintering: When It’s Time to Retreat

November. Winter has arrived. Cool winds bite the skin, sunlight plays truant, and darkness descends early in the evenings. Some trees are still in blossom but on most others, leaves are changing colour from green to amber to orange to russet to brown. Soon, the tree will shed these leaves before going dormant. It knows how to protect itself when the light has diminished. It understands that it must halt its growth for some time, and conserve energy during this dormancy. It also knows that soon the season will change, and it will grow new shoots and flowers and fruits in abundance.

What about us humans? Our internal landscape keeps changing throughout the day. One moment we are gung-ho, and the very next, an unkind word or an unexpected turn of events can send us spiralling down a dark hole. While most of us are equipped to deal with these waves of emotions with well-oiled mechanisms, sometimes the darkness lingers and swallows us whole, and we see no light. It is then that, like trees, we need to acknowledge the arrival of winter in our lives, step back, retreat, and hibernate. Thus begins the season for rest and recuperation.

Katherine May’s poignant, poetic memoir, ‘Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times’, explores this dark season, the consolations of nature, the power of slowing down, and the eventual promise of the light of spring. She writes, “Everybody winters at one time or the other; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness: perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure.  Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence.” Sound familiar?

May writes about her own personal winter; how things started falling apart slowly. She traces her journey from October to March, beginning with a prologue that talks about a blazing day in September, a week before her fortieth birthday, when it all began. “Some winters happen in the sun.” It was a time when she had given notice as a university lecturer in order to write full time. First, her husband’s appendix burst while he was awaiting surgery. Next, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Then her six-year-old son refused to go to school. May understood. She had been there before. At 17, she had suffered major depression, and had been diagnosed with Asperger’s. She had learned to “winter young”. “I found the seed of a will to live, and its tenacity surprised me,” she writes.

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Interestingly, while she maintains that “Happiness is the greatest skill we’ll ever learn,” she insists that sadness too is a skill. “As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. . . Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

What does May do? She begins searching for "liminal spaces to inhabit".  She cooks, and pickles marsh plants. She attends an early morning solstice gathering at Stonehenge. May writes about pregnancy, wolves, C.S. Lewis, home-schooling, the preponderance of snow in fairy tales, the cold weather survival tactics of bees. She recalls her visits to Iceland and Norway. Convinced that "the cold has healing powers” she takes up ice swimming, plunging daily into the chilly water near her home in Whitstable, and building up tolerance slowly. “After all, you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?" she avers. May trusts her natural instincts to lead her towards healing.

There are no quick-fix tips in this book, and none of the banal advice to perk up, nor is it a self-absorbed narrative. May does not promise a happily ever after. In fact, she concedes that “There will still often be the debris to shift of a long, disordered season’, and yet, “the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of wings.” Funny in places, wise and gentle in its approach, this memoir is a comforting, thought-provoking read.

Archana Pai Kulkarni is the Books Editor at SheThePeople. The views expressed are the author's own. 

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