Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”

In “Indian Summer,” May gives a concise definition of wintering, as a season when a person is the opposite of all that is deemed acceptable by mainstream society. The conditions of this misery make one an outsider rather than an active participant. May’s use of the second-person singular is a direct address to the reader and challenges them to recognize themselves as an occasional winterer.

“We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer. And that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves. We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun; an endless unvarying high season. But life’s not like that.”

May uses the metaphor of eternal summer in “Indian Summer” to show how as a society people only tolerate permanent good times. They imagine that if their life does not pan out that way, it is because of a personal failing. While continually feeling the warmth of the sun could be blissful and reassuring, the false premise that life should be always good puts undue responsibility on the individual, who cannot control many parts of their existence. The myth of an eternal high season could therefore be cruel, as it fails to be empathetic and make space for the times when life takes an unexpected downturn.

“But somewhere there, in the depths, I found the seed of a will to live, and its tenacity surprised me. More than that: it made me strangely optimistic. Winter had blanked me, blasted me wide open. In all that whiteness, I saw the chance to make myself new again.”

With this quote from “Indian Summer,” May gives voice to the epiphanies that can occur in the depths of wintry despair. In winter, she implies, an individual can test and even find the true mettle of their strength. There is also a springlike opportunity for renewal within winter, as humans are given the chance to dispense with all that no longer serves them and begin anew. Thus, May finds unexpected optimism in this most pessimistic of seasons. By leaning into their winters, individuals can truly find a way to get through them.

“My beloved house—my beloved home—has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it.”

In “Making Ready,” entropy, a result of an increased status of chaos in May’s home, is a metaphor for her state of mind. Just as the faults in the house that May loves so much have increased incrementally over a period of benign neglect, so have the sore points in May’s mental health. The ideas of feeling broken and worn out apply to May as much as the house. May’s helplessness stems from the fact that she feels as though she has been unable to prevent any of this from happening.

“I can feel the downturn coming; I know that baking and soup-making can’t sustain me forever. It will get worse than this: darker, leaner, lonelier. I want to lay down a bed of straw beneath me to cushion the blow when it comes. I want to make everything ready.”

Here, in “Making Ready,” May describes the autumnal feeling of being on the cusp of winter. She knows that her distraction through abundant kitchen pursuits cannot last forever, and that facing her winter will be inevitable. Still, there is a sense that the cooking is a form of cushioning, a counterpart to the straw bed she imagines making for when winter truly hits. It is therefore productive and a procrastination strategy at the same time.

“It isn’t damp like English cold; just cold cold, a kind of purity of coldness that feels absolute.”

May describes the Icelandic cold as pure in “Hot Water,” as though there is no obstruction between her and the wintry sensation. There is a kind of joy and escapism in this absolute state. In contrast, the dampness of her native English cold provides an additional quality to the sensation, which makes it less pure. While the Icelandic cold can be abstracted from all emotion and memories, the English cold, with its quality of dampness, has a host of them attached. Thus, metaphorically speaking, the coldness May experiences in England is less invigorating than provocative.

“I hope that it will give me a little of that northern clarity; a little of that vital contrast against the coldness of life. In fact, I imagine myself sitting contentedly in the hot, pine twilight of the sauna, drinking in mystic wisdom, and improving my pores no end.”

May gets carried away in “Hot Water” imagining the life-altering transformation that the ritual of the sauna will bring. The multisensory appeal of the “hot, pine twilight” indicates the state of pleasant immersion she wishes to achieve, as the sauna will be a miracle cure for the overwhelming “coldness of life.” As the sauna is an integrated part of the wellness routine of May’s Finnish friend Hanne, May hopes that she too will benefit from the device that aids the Nordic people she so admires. This naïve beginning promises disappointment.

“Halloween is an overturning of the natural order […] and has its lineage in old traditions of reversing the roles, letting the poor become rulers, and bringing the rich low. […] At Halloween, the next generation (who, after all, seem unlikely to be able to afford their own version of my pitted front door) get to express their wound-up potential for making trouble, and so offer us a comforting vision of the restraint they show for the rest of the year.”

In the section “Ghost Stories,” May links the historic significance of Halloween, which was a reversal of power hierarchies, to the present moment, as she contemplates how young people who will never be able to accrue her generation’s privileges use this traditional night of misdemeanor to let off steam. The idea of “wound-up potential for making trouble” indicates that the young have good reasons to be angry, while the “restraint” shows the almost unnatural discipline they show the rest of the year when they stay within the boundaries set out for them by their elders.

“Our contemporary 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.”

In “Ghost Stories,” May addresses a major shift. While the original Halloween was centered around the relationship of the living and the dead, modern-day celebrations eschew confronting this tradition. They are thus stripped of their profundity, as they cannot console the bereaved or help them negotiate a new phase in life without their loved ones. For May, this erasure of death from Halloween corresponds with our society’s eradication of all reminders of it from the public sphere. While youth is torturously pursued, death, aging, and illness are ignored, in the hope that they will become invisible and not plague our consciousnesses.

“There is a change in the air. Early morning, when I open the back door, it billows into the kitchen, crisp, cold and fresh as mint. It makes white clouds of my breath. Winter has decorated ordinary life. Some days, everything sparkles, glamorizing the lids of bins and the tarmac patchwork of the pavements.”

In November, as winter approaches, it transforms and etherealizes everything. Something as mundane as human breath becomes white clouds, and everyday objects like trash can lids sparkle as though they are something precious. The idea that “some days, everything sparkles” conveys the notion that winter is not always pessimistic. May highlights this change under the section called “Metamorphosis.”

“There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our true instincts for darkness, and its invitation to spend some time in the proximity of our dreams.”

In “Slumber,” May writes about how the permanently luminous nature of the contemporary world means that most humans spend insufficient time in the type of darkness that allows for rest, repair, and contemplation. Arguably, the contemporary world’s banishment of nighttime, aligns with its attempt to banish wintering and negative experiences. However, without a proper nighttime, individuals will never get to know their unconscious and gain insight from what it is trying to tell them.

“There is no distinct moment of release. It’s reminiscent of a missed orgasm; that long, intent, breath-holding build-up that comes to nothing much. The significance is the same either way. Light is coming back into the world, after months of encroaching darkness.”

The simile of a missed orgasm in “Midwinter” illuminates the lack of climax in May’s experience of watching the Druid winter solstice celebration at Stonehenge. It is as though she has missed some element of magic in the display. However, the rational significance of the experience is important, as it marks the year’s turn towards summer.

“It made a difference to celebrate that change in the presence of others. It added a little joy to the simple act of noticing, and bolstered the dark need that lurked behind it with fellow human spirit. It took away a little of the shame at needing it.”

May illustrates the importance of community in winter in “Midwinter” by describing the comfort and joy she felt marking the darkest point of the year with others at Stonehenge. Although such an attitude is unfashionable in a secular, rational age, normalizing the universal need to feel comfort in winter and consoled by others is a healthy measure against the shame that keeps people isolated.

“That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience, and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”

In “Epiphany,” May writes about how, while feeling sadness might seem inevitable, modern society has done everything in its power to distract from this feeling. Instead, the work of wintering is to honor sadness, spend time with it, and learn from it in a commitment to improving one’s experience of it. The simile of the knife addresses the pain often associated with feeling one’s needs acutely.

“Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on. And in return, it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out.”

May describes the social responsibility of wintering in “Epiphany.” While it begins as a personal journey, it can be amplified by learning from the experiences of those who have wintered in a similar way, or by passing on one’s own wintering stories to future generations. These stories of doom, so different from the fashionable stories of triumph, are “gifts” in May’s opinion, as people make each other feel less alone in the difficult business of living.

“There is nothing showy about the northern lights, nothing obvious or demanding. They hide from you at first, and then they whisper to you. […] eventually, at a pace set entirely by the firmament, we were given the gift of seeing them, as if in reward for our faith and patience.”

While May has longed to see the northern lights for a lifetime, the reality of these natural wonders is nothing like the digitally altered media image of them. She addresses this in “Darkness.” Instead of being a brash display, they are delicate and elusive. They appear to May in their own time and require patience. This quiet display aligns the natural wonders with winter, a season that does not advertise its beauties showily, but instead does so in a subtle way that draws out the beholder’s insight and wisdom. Their beauty is therefore more rewarding and has a more personal quality.

“There seemed to be so many wonderful permutations of the aurorae, but all of them were fleeting, as if the line between your hopes and the reality was unclear. It was an experience not dissimilar from pregnancy itself: the sense, one moment, that something very definite is there, and the realization, the next, that everything you know about it is a daydream.”

In “Darkness,” May compares her fleeting glimpse of the natural wonder the aurorae to the unique time in her life when she was pregnant. Both pregnancy and witnessing the northern lights are life-altering and tangible in the moment; however, when they are over and no longer able to be seen or experienced, they have the flimsy quality of a daydream or the product of one’s imagination. The coincidence of these two important moments in May’s life enhances the meaning of both.

“Years of existing alone in forests, stalking one of the great predators, had heightened his senses to the point that human society felt unbearable. Without a doubt, he had taken on their traits, but to be wolf-like for him was to be quiet and watchful, intent, pared back.”

May shows in “Hunger” how the wolf-tracker, a man who has devoted his life to the study of wolves, shares many traits in common with the animals. His appreciation for these maligned creatures extends to his preference of their ways and habitats to human ones. Thanks to the wolf-tracker’s heightened senses, he prefers the quiet of the forest and finds the clamor of human life overwhelming. His wolf-like watchful quietness, as opposed to frenetic activity, aligns him with the wintry traits that May extols in her memoir.

“We waited for it, impatient as children ourselves; every year, we would buy him a pair of warm padded trousers with a matching jacket at the beginning of the winter months, and every year they have hung on the coat rack, forlorn. Bert himself talks of snow as a kind of mythological beast, like the dragons he would wish into existence if he could.”

This passage from “Snow” expresses the scarcity of snow in Southeast England in recent years. The rarity of this natural phenomenon causes May’s young son to view it as a mythical beast that he is no more likely to see than a dragon. The anticipation for such a transformative wonder causes May to become childlike in her impatience for it. Her purchase of snow-gear for her son results from a feat of magical thinking, whereby she imagines that if she prepares enough for snow, it will surely arrive.

“I love the inconvenience the same way that I can sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside of your normal habits. I love the visual transformation that it brings about, that recoloring of the world into sparkling white, and the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they past.”

This quote is from “Snow.” May benefits from the inconveniences that heavy snowfall brings to ill-equipped Southeast England, where such weather is a novelty. The simile of the bad cold indicates her longing for natural phenomena that will slow her down and take her out of her routine. Such disruptions can make her forget the daily grind and truly pay attention to life. The increased vulnerability and joy that humans ill-accustomed to snow feel in its presence causes them to become friendlier, as the blanket of white has a transformative impact.

“Getting out, your skin turns bright red, not the color of a blush or a hot flush, but the specific, deep orange of Heinz tomato soup. I learn to love that color, my signal of having endured something so unlike anything else in my days.”

The specificity of the color of May’s skin upon emerging from the freezing sea water highlights the unique effects of cold-water swimming in “Cold Water.” The unnatural manufactured orange color of tinned soup brands her with a mark of endurance that is unlike anything else that the body can experience. It is also a symbol of her vitality.

“In the very depths of winter, Plath seems to reach for a way to survive through work—women’s work, the kind that entails quiet hours in the house. ‘Winter is for women,’ she says in ‘Wintering.’ It is perhaps, a time when the feminine arts come into their own; but she is also commenting, I think, on lean times that women can survive.”

In “Survival,” May reveals that Plath’s poem was an inspiration for her book of the same title. The femininity of the winter season is associated with women’s traditional crafts; winter’s more “yin” or introverted energies expose the “yang” or outward-looking ones of summer. The works of quiet creativity are also an affront to lean times, even as they collaborate with them, showing that women can survive and thrive even in the harshest conditions.

“Now, standing in this room with the rain hammering on the window, I let my voice find its fluency again, absorbing myself in the pleasure of my own speech, the way that my throat could fill with the resonance of my voice.”

The idea in “Song” that the wintry rain is an accompaniment to May’s rediscovery of her voice continues the book’s consistent idea that winter is the time for personal healing. Like the incessant rain, May’s voice finds its fluency after a season of pauses and interruptions. Feeling the sounds in her throat, she gains physical pleasure from speech and a sense of renewal.