Wintering

By Katherine May

Our contemporary Western celebrations forget the dead altogether, or at least remove them from any association with grief and loss. They offer no comfort to those who mourn. We are, after all a society that has done all it can to erase death, to pursue youth to the bitter end, and to sideline the elderly and infirm…but winter is a t ime when death comes closest - when the cold feels as though it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts. WE still perceive the presence of those we’ve lost in the silence of those long evenings and in the depths of darkness that they bring.

This is a book of comfort for the worn and weary soul. But it is also a book of hope and truth delivered in lyric and poetic prose. Having read it only recently, I wished it had been available during my dark days of early grief. The subtitle of this book “The power of rest and retreat in difficult times,” resonated deeply with my experience.

I my own book, I wrote of longing for a spiritual ICU, a place of complete retreat from the demands of the world where I could gently attend to my wounds. We all need this at different times in our lives. It doesn’t have to be an outcome of trauma. It can be a choice when the daily demands render us no longer able to cope. May starts her book by giving herself (and us) permission to declare our own need of “wintering.” Of her entry point, she said,

What can you do when you’re already doing everything? The problem with “everything” is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity with all the meaning sheared away.

May invites us to the beginning of her own wintering one cold, dark October, and walks us through the year. She brings beautiful metaphors to a process inherent in transitions and transformations that is so deeply held as to be otherwise invisible. She talks about abscission, the dropping of leaves by deciduous trees as a way of understanding our own arc of growth, maturity and renewal. She describes how the solitude of wintering saves us from ‘displaying our darkest selves to the waking world.’ She actually makes me want to inhabit the liminal space which I used to resist. The space without distraction, waiting for new growth which can only be fertilized with our attention.

She shares with us beautiful myths embedded quietly in a little known culture of Norwegian herdsmen called Sami and their animistic faith.

And she gave me yet another understanding of the grief I continue to integrate into my life. She says:

That’s what grief is~a yearning for that one last moment of contact that would settle everything.

In short, she uses the dark of wintering to peek beyond the heavy drapes, crack open the windows and finally step through the doors of what awaits when this particular metamorphosis finds its expression.

If you find yourself wintering, or longing to winter, pick up this book. It will be a welcome companion.