Wintering
Some Notes on Katherine May's Beautiful Book on The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times...
“Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
-Katherine May
One of the great dangers of winter is isolation. And the potential of being shut in somehow by the conditions of life or world, and in turn cut off from external sources of provision that we once relied upon for our sense of security and well being. How we respond to this depends on who we are, how we are wired, and our acquaintance with, and acceptance of, the ebbs and flows of the seasons.
Some may cling to a summer gone by, longing for, or perhaps even living as if winter has not arrived. Like the first humans in the garden, we might stand reaching for fig leaves, trying to create some artificial cover for ourselves beneath the comfortable illusion that we are not exposed.
But to this May points out,
“Plants and animals don’t fight winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter 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 transformation occurs. Winter is not death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
And yet many of us live in a culture and in western expressions of Christianity where winter isn’t observed. Where withdrawal is rejected, and scantness of resources is avoided, anything brutal is shunned, and vanishing isn’t an option. Which is bizarre considering the life of Jesus. But regardless, we often don’t know what to do when winter arrives. Or we don’t feel licensed to do it. Which means that we might miss out on the transformative power of winter when she arrives.
As I was reading this book, I kept thinking about something that I heard in graduate school. A survival tool used by farmers during blizzards. Like winter, blizzards are disorienting. If you have ever stood in a white out condition you know that it can become difficult to orient yourself, even in the most familiar of places. Buildings and landmarks are obscured by snow drifts, and walls of falling snow paint your periphery in an impenetrable canvas of white.
For these farmers, doing the necessary work of moving from home to out buildings become a matter of life or death. And sometimes so much snow would have fallen while they were out tending animals that they couldn’t find their original path and froze to death as they searched for the way home. As a solution, farmers began running ropes, just above their heads, between their houses and their barns, so that whenever they got lost, they could reach up, grab that rope, and be led out.
True stories are like this rope. The Gospel is a rope. And this book, and May’s honest and authentic account of her winter, can function as one too. She tells it in a way that reads like a gentle hand, outstretched to readers who may need it today, or some day in the future, when winter is disorienting, and they need direction and hope that there is a beautiful and trustworthy way out.
A Few Highlights…
January…
May closes this chapter discussing a friend she has met who tracks wolves, and who now teaches shepherds about them in an effort to preserve the lives of wolf and sheep alike. After learning from him she began to research their history and behavior which leads her to this observation, “in the wolf we are offered a mirror of ourselves as we might be, without the comforts and constraints of civilization.” Which is a powerful enough insight on its own, but then she goes on to add,
“In the depths of our winters, we are wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly accurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things – love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while. Everyday. Life is so often isolated, dreary and lonely. A craving is understandable. A little craving might actually be the rally cry of survival.”
February…
In the section titled February, May discusses a series of children’s books that have been like ropes of her own. From C.S. Lewis’ The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, and John Masefields The Box of Delights, she illuminated characters whose own encounters with winter have given meaning to her time in the dark.
She says,
“In children’s literature, snowfall is a trigger for tables to turn. It creates a moment in which the usual adult protectors are easily incapacitated and introduces a world in which children are agile and wild enough to survive. In the monumental battles these children face, the great are brought low and the weak rise up in power. This can only happen in the depths of mid-winter, when the ordinary features of the world are erased.”
Song…
Towards the end of the book she discusses losing her voice. Not just in a creative sense, but she actually lost her voice. And to get it back she ended up in the loving care of a vocal coach who healed her condition by encouraging her to sing. In this chapter she draws a connection between her voice with her relevance, at one point, while discussing the life of Margaret Thatcher she notices that “men’s voices have never been contested in the same way as women’s have.
But, she continues,
“When you start to use your voice as music, you are allowed to demand attention. You are allowed to say, ‘Listen.’ My voice had waned alongside my confidence, and asserting it again was like asserting my rightful part in the adult world. I was gabbling out words because I felt I had to get them in before I was interrupted.”
In Summary…
This book is gentle, beautiful, honest, and helpful as we all make our own ways, in our own time, through our own winters. May gives her readers permission to live through winter, and not rush it or reject it. But instead to have the courage to retreat into it so that we might be transformed, and one day emerge with our voices restored so that we too can sing our song of spring.
Happy reading, friends!
I loved this book so much; just recognizing that seasons of winter are normal and not something to rage against or hurry through.
Wintering is probably one of my favorite reads. I really enjoyed it. It kinda helped me embrace winter (both the season and hard times) and the idea of hibernating and allowing yourself to be comforted by it.