Wintering

I just read Krista Tippett’s recent interview with author Katherine May, on NPR’s “On Being.” May’s book is Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

I have to admit, as relevant as the topic seemed, I had to force myself to continue past the subtitle. I’m inordinately wary of the “rest, relax, take care of yourself” advice given to us who are already the most over-privileged people in the world. I want to call out (and, sadly, often do): ‘No, no, no. Get up and get busy, stay involved and active, take care of others instead, especially those who have little rest and even less care.’ Then I dismount from that high horse and think it through more carefully. The tired, worn out, depleted good people I know personally help with that; this interview does, too.

Winter, according to May is, of course a season, but it is also a metaphor. It stands in for the restoration times we need in life; it describes the harsh, lonely, cold, isolated times we all experience no matter what season it is, and it also becomes a symbol for one of life’s more painful trajectories constantly cycling into and retreating from our days. She states: “I’ve come to think of our pandemic world as one vast, communal experience of wintering.” 

Parts of these last two years and even now feel as if she is absolutely right. We seem to be falling again and again through wintery ice into ever deepening cold and dark.  May describes it this way:

“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open and you fall through them into Somewhere Else. And Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. … I think, for all of my life, that experience has been a feeling of falling through the cracks: being there on your own, and looking up through those cracks at the world carrying on around you.”

I think we can relate that description not only to our own pandemic lives but to our particular missions and passions, like Church reform, like inclusion and celebration of all peoples and all genders. And so, her recommendation for how we spend this “wintering” time did not rankle as it may have done with me in other times:

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

Krista Tippett adds her own reflection: “I’m trying to take this wintering moment, both the season and in our culture, to try to get really clear in myself who I do want to be on the other side, how I want to live on the other side.” I love that kind of questioning as an example of important, even critical, action we can take within what could seem like a time of self-indulgent inaction.

Katherine May presents further insight from one of the most non-Catholic spokespeople I’ve ever included in these posts, former U.K. Chief Druid, Philip Carr-Gomm. He told her: “In the pagan year, there is a ceremony or a ritual, or something being marked, every six weeks across the year, and that that gives hope for anybody who is currently suffering because you are never far away from the next moment when you can get together and when you can celebrate. But also, it gives you a sense of time passing, which is really helpful when you’re struggling because time can begin to drag, and you can get mired in hopelessness … (instead) you get a kind of marker of your progress.”

May concludes with a description of her own “wintering” process:

I recognized winter. I saw it coming a mile off, since you ask, and I looked it in the eye. I greeted it and let it in. I had some tricks up my sleeve, you see. I’ve learned them the hard way. When I started to feel the drag of winter, I began to treat myself like a favored child, with kindness and love. I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important. I kept myself well fed, and I made sure I was getting enough sleep. I took myself for walks in the fresh air and spent time doing things that soothed me. I asked myself, what is this winter all about? I asked myself, what change is coming?”

One of her simplest sentences, however, gave the most solace to my guilt ridden (Alas-I’m-not-doing-enough-to-help-alleviate-the-world’s-suffering) self: We might just:

“give ourselves a break when we need it and to be kind, to find our own grit in our own time.”