The Benefits of Wintering

Photo Credit: Grace Gelder

I was going to write about mushrooms today, about their “undergroundness” and the way their fine mesh networks together giants like Oak and Ash. But I got diverted by a book: Wintering By Katherine May. Hearing May read excerpts from her book on the podcast On Being immediately caught and diverted my attention. I love how she depicts winter as a season to which we must return to again and again, not something merely to be endured, but rather a season we must learn to navigate, to savour it as a time for rest and drawing in, knowing spring will come. This lockdown is a kind of collective wintering, although it’s distorted and fragmented because peoples’ experiences are radically different one from another. I’ve been noticing lately how I do not give myself permission to rest; I have a “to do” list but not a “to be” list. But at the end of the day a “to do” list just gets you through life, it doesn’t allow you to live the full scope of your life. Or to quote Diane Ackerman who put it much better,

“I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”

-Diane Ackerman

Photo Credit: Grace Gelder

That skill of navigating life’s cycles — May sees winter not only as a literal season, but as a period returned to throughout life — is undervalued. When my mom passed away, our family retreated from daily life. By example, we tried to tech our children to honour periods of grief and to trust that things get better, but that that first requires us to accept how we feel today. But as things have returned back to “normal” I find myself valuing “carrying on” above acceptance and the kind of stillness we endure in winter. I get busy. I tick things off my list. I have timetables. I get in a rush. I elevate my expectations. But if we never winter, if our life is a perpetual summer, then we will burnout. Just as I began to submit to a certain speed of life, Katherine May turned me gently back toward that time of grief. She reminds me that we’re not meant to live life as though we are forever going somewhere, ascending toward a definition of progress we often don’t quite believe in. Rather, life is meant to be lived in cycles and wintering helps return us to that knowledge.

What does your wintering look like?