I have long struggled with winter. I grew in Minnesota where winters were long and brutally cold. I remember hauling myself through hip-deep snowdrifts on my walk to elementary school and that was in the suburbs! The North of England, where I lived for nearly twenty years, has a much milder climate. But being so far north, I was plunged into infernal darkness from Halloween to Candlemas. It started getting dark at 3:30 in the afternoon and by 4:00 it was pitch dark. Remember those horror movies where it’s dark ALL THE TIME?? That’s Lancashire in midwinter. I felt I was trapped inside some brooding gothic novel.
Now that I’ve moved to the Silver Coast of Portugal, I get a lot more daylight in winter, but also storm winds and torrential rain. My Welsh pony was not impressed and her companion, a Lusitano gelding who came up from Southern Portugal, was so grumpy that he looked like he wanted to jump on the next horse trailer back to the Alentejo!
Yet no matter where I’ve lived geographically, I have always faced the same struggle. I find I just can’t get as much done in winter as I do in the summer. Winter’s short days and long nights seem to drain my energy and drive. While summer is expansive with so many sun-filled hours to fill, in winter everything seems to shrink to the size of a single candleflame. Every year I fought tooth and nail against that contraction. But winter always won.
This winter, curled up by the fireplace on a stormy night, I plunged into Katherine May’s highly recommended book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. In her book, she refers to winter not just as a season in the year, but any fallow or difficult period in our life when we must withdraw, lick our wounds, and replenish ourselves. Our personal winter might be an illness, a relationship break-up, the death of a loved one, a feeling of spiritual dryness, or a time of burnout when we just have to stop and rest.
In Nature, darkness and winter are absolutely necessary for life’s regeneration. May adds that our personal winters, though we would never seek them out, are likewise regenerating and ultimately healing if we can be present with them, as scary and painful as they seem, without seeing them as some personal failure we brought upon ourselves for not being strong enough to resist the natural cycles of death, dissolution, and fallowness.
We live in a culture deep in denial about winter and wintering, where we’re supposed to be “on” all the time, as if we existed in a perpetual summer, full of summer’s buzz, energy, and busy-ness. But if we try to doggedly maintain this level of intense activity during winter when all the elements, as well as our internal rhythms, are telling us to slow down and rest, we get ill, we get burn out, we get depressed.
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter,” May reminds us. “They don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in summer. . . . They adapt.” She adds that once we stop fighting the winter, it can be a most blessed season of reflection and recuperation. In an age when even getting enough sleep and rest feels like a radical act, May teaches us to invite the winter in.
May’s book taught me the importance of welcoming the most wintery aspects of my own psyche, all the shadowy stuff I like to repress. Winter is a time of welcoming the shadows. No part of myself needs to be left out in the cold. Anger, doubt, sadness, and uncertainty are not flaws that need to be “fixed.” Just stay present with them in compassionate awareness.
Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere finds ourselves nearly at the threshold of the Spring Equinox. Yet we are still deep in the collective winter of the Covid pandemic, a winter that’s dragged on for over a year. All of us are hitting the pandemic wall. How much more of this can we take? It’s not so easy to rest and regenerate if you’re a mother working remotely while simultaneously trying to homeschool your kids. The pandemic has hit women and girls especially hard, as they carry the brunt of domestic tasks. Girls’ schoolwork is suffering as they take on more and more housework during lockdown. Family violence rates are soaring across the world. In this pandemic winter we meet not only our personal shadows, but the horrors that were lurking in the collective that we can no longer afford to ignore.
If we go through a personal or a collective winter, we need a refuge. A mature spirituality that meets us where we are, that’s robust enough to carry us through the Dark Night of the Soul. Spiritual bypassing and trite tropes like “everything happens for a reason” have no place here. A good litmus test for mature spirituality is to see how spiritual spokespeople from this tradition have responded to the pandemic. Unfortunately, I’ve heard several variations of “God/dess is punishing us for climate change.” While climate change is real and undoubtedly the biggest crisis we face today, I don’t think this punitive imagining of the divine is a helpful or enlightening paradigm for anyone. Life under Covid is hard enough without being told we’re being punished for our sins.
Mature spirituality gives us the courage us look deep into the darkness without flinching. Without seeing it as evil or as punishment but as the deep, compelling, beautiful mystery that surrounds the divine. The fertile darkness. May we all find rest and regeneration here.
Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the globe-trotting mystic and rabble-rouser, Margery Kempe, will be published in April 2021. Visit her website.
feminismandreligion.com 
Excellent piece, Mary. This quote from your essay rings true with me these days. “…our personal winters, though we would never seek them out, are likewise regenerating and ultimately healing if we can be present with them, as scary and painful as they seem, without seeing them as some personal failure we brought upon ourselves for not being strong enough to resist the natural cycles of death, dissolution, and fallowness.” Making friends with the cold and dark! Thank you for writing. Will check out Katherine May’s book.
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Thank you for reading, Esther!
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I really appreciated this post. Unlike you, I find winter a time of creativity, reflection, a time to dream… I love dark starlit nights and the white moon in Maine. It is the harsh transition from winter to spring as we “spring” into daylight savings time that flings me down into depression, that and old snow. Apparently I do most everything in reverse… now I feel the collective “pressure” – the “buzz” to do do do as I watch folks spring into frantic action while I am bemoaning the increased level of people noise all around me.
I also see very disturbing signs regarding Covid – people no longer wearing masks – behaving as if this pandemic is over – a casual attitude that could have dire consequences and keep this particular virus going. It is abundantly clear from the states like Texas and Florida who have abandoned wearing masks that we are NOT learning from our mistakes…
And more “winter” may be ahead…
Those periods of dissolution, depression, sadness whenever they come need to be respected as part of the process of being alive – and yet every year when spring rolls around I find myself resisting my own descent.
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That’s really fascinating, Sara. It’s interesting the different ways our bodies and cycles respond to these changing cycles. I’m also disturbed by the people not taking any Covid precautions. Eek! Wishing you every blessing as you navigate a tricky spring.
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Yes, my body seems to thrive on lower light and needs stillness to be most creative – this time of year I often feel numb –
However, I also know that I came close to being aborted illegally sometime in this next month so there is real ground for a descent to occur.
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That’s heavy stuff. I admire your courage in taking this descent on.
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When I was in graduate school, I heard often from the other students that they could not come to a meeting or a party because they were “working on my dissertation.” Of course they weren”t, not all of the time, and not all of the time they frittered away without enjoyment. Then one of my friends told me, “I work on my dissertation from 9-5, M-F, and then I rest or play.” He said he was sure he got more done than the others who were working “all the time.” I think he was right. The same can be said for other rhythms in our life. Working all the time, we get less done and don’t allow ourselves to enjoy other aspects of life. Thanks for this reflection.
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Thanks for reading, Carol! Yes, balance is everything!
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Thanks for this post, Mary. I will look for this book as I enter a personal period of wintering in the midst of oncoming spring.
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Wishing you a deeply restorative personal winter.
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Brava! As usual, you’ve written an excellent post with which many of us can identify. Yes, we’ve been through a year-long Covid winter. Are we enduring personal winters, too? I bet nearly everyone is. And I think we’re nearly all seeking regeneration. I see us as being sort of like plants in the dark ground, sleeping, gaining strength from the fertile darkness in which we’re embedded. And pretty soon now, the light will come, and we’ll sprout and grow. You’re right: we do need a mature spirituality. Bright blessings, my friend. Stay warm and stay safe.
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Thank you for reading, Barbara!
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Thanks, Mary, for this beautiful post. Seeing winter as a possible antidote to the always-busy mentality of our culture is a seasonally appropriate response. It’s funny, though, that your post reminds me of a summer sermon I wrote about the importance of taking time off, of vacationing, which usually happens in the summer. In Europe that’s taken for granted to a much greater extent than here with our Puritan values. I don’t know about Great Britain, but Germany and the Scandinavian countries have month-long vacations protected by law.
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I lived for many years in Germany and while we were in the UK, my husband and I took a lot of time off to travel, as well. But now with Covid, you can’t go anywhere officially, so that means we have to remind ourselves to rest in place, if we can’t take an actual vacation. Something that is very hard for freelancers to do!
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Thanks, Mary. Good insights.
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Thanks for reading, Max! <3
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I have had similar experience with my relationship with winter. I used to really dread it for many of the same reasons – too dark, too cold, lack of energy, etc, but over time I have come to love and embrace winter. Your words ” the darkness …. as the deep, compelling, beautiful mystery that surrounds the divine. The fertile darkness.” ring so true to me. Now I welcome the time to slow down. This year was the very first time that I actually felt a moment of sadness on Feb 2 when Brigid emerges from the winter darkness and the return to light begins. I wasn’t yet ready to let go of the quiet. Thanks for expressing the need to embrace the darkness so beautifully. I love the painting by Jessica Boehman!
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Thank you for reading, Judith!
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I love this post! I wish someone had warned me about how to survive the winters in Northern America before my family and I emigrated from Mexico. I came from living in sunny, warm weather in Mexico to extreme cold and snow weather in Northern Illinois. I didn’t understand why I felt a certain way during the bitter winters in the Midwest until I became an adult and lived in several places in the U.S. I have to read this book from Katherine May!
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Wow, those cold winters must have been quite a culture shock for you! Thanks for reading and stay warm. :)
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