Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Making Ready

Following her husband’s sickness, May’s doctor prescribes her sick leave from work for her abdominal pain. May feels less ashamed of having a diagnosed physical sickness than admitting the truth that she is overwhelmed by her workload and life in general. Since the birth of her son, she has juggled childcare alongside book-writing and her academic career. This has left her feeling tired and “hollowed out” (23). Her home, with its furnishings and structure in disrepair, mirrors her internal state. As she notices these changes, she feels that vengeful gods have sentenced her to a sort of winter: a “transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created” (24).

She engages in activities such as cooking, baking, and making pickles and preserves to keep her hands busy and defer looking into the difficult feelings that have caused her anxiety. She enjoys this engagement with food and other tactile objects, feeling that she was deprived of it during her years of overwork. She senses that she is trying to make everything ready before things get worse and winter properly arrives.

The tradition of preparing for winter is familiar to Hanne Mällinen-Scott, a Finnish woman who informs May that in Liminka, Finland, preparations for winter begin in July. Home repairs, baking, pickling, and a complete change of wardrobe are essential for a place where half the year is spent in below freezing temperatures. Hanne, who lost her father to suicide in the month of December, warns that those who do not adequately prepare for winter may face dangerous mood changes. 

May feels that a few weeks off work give her a sense of recuperation, and she has come up with a routine that suits her. However, she is paranoid that her colleagues who have had to pick up her workload during her convalescence will judge her as deficient. She feels lonely and cut off from them.

Hot Water

May’s perennial fascination with the North leads her to seek vacations in icy climates. While warm-weather destinations feel “unreal” to her, she finds that “in the cold, I find I can think straight; the air feels clean and uncluttered” (41). She prefers to invite in the cold and acclimatize to it, rather than stave it off by going somewhere warm.

While on sick leave, her doctor persuades her to go on a long-awaited trip to Iceland, warning her that she should take opportunities when she can, as she cannot be certain of the future.

In Iceland, May visits the famous Blue Lagoon, a manmade pool with water supplied by a nearby geothermal power plant. The water, which is about the temperature of a hot bath, has healing properties. When May gets tonsillitis, she indulges in a reread of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, which is also set in the frozen North. The book features a man named Tony Makarios who is severed from his animal daemon or soul. This represents how May feels in the moment, and she finds companionship in the image.

Having been raised in mild Southeast England, May has never had to prepare for winter in the manner of Nordic people and thinks that the extreme cold “has healing powers that I don’t yet come close to understanding” (46). She wants to return to such places.

May notices that Hanne is obsessed with spending time in the sauna, talking about it as a kind of spiritual state. In Finland, everyone has access to a sauna in their home or apartment block, and up until recently the key life-stages of childbirth and dying occurred in saunas.

When May tries to get a dose of the experience at her local gym, she finds that the extreme, sudden heat does not agree with her; she feels so faint that she must seek help. After this experience of public humiliation, May realizes that she cannot adopt Nordic rituals wholesale and must give herself time to acclimatize. Most of all, she feels that she must seek out real cold.

Ghost Stories

Halloween was originally modeled on the ancient Gaelic tradition of Samhain, a festival held when the border between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. In ancient Celtic cultures, this night was celebrated with fire, scattering ashes, and rituals of divination. Most importantly, Samhain took note of the limbo states of transition, between living and dead or one state of life and another. For May, it is also the “border-crossing into winter” (56).

In contrast, today’s commercialized Halloween seems to forget the dead alongside Western society’s propensity to banish death and ignore the elderly and infirm. To May, “today’s Halloween only reflects what we secretly think: that death is a surrender to a decay that makes us monsters” (60). However, winter is the season that brings death closest, when individuals can most sense the presence of the people they have lost. May considers winter to be the season of ghosts. To her, people’s continual fascination with ghosts indicates their own hope that the dead will remember them, and that in the face of this incomprehensible loss, people will not lose the meaning that the lives of the dead gave them. 

Metamorphosis

As November begins, May gets accustomed to her abdominal pain. She has several tests to find out what is wrong with her gut. It is as slow as a 70-year-old’s, and she is prescribed a low-fiber diet. More importantly, she is prescribed rest during winter so that she can enter spring rejuvenated.

May learns that the winter period in another person’s life may seem obvious to outsiders, but often their own experience is different. For example, May assumed that the winter in her artist friend Shelly Goldsmith’s life was the coma she entered following a sudden bout of bacterial meningitis. Even though the event had serious life consequences for Shelly, who had to spend a month and a half in hospital and quit art school for the year, it was not her most significant period of wintering. For her, that happened when she was 25 and her parents suddenly moved from the U.K. to America. Shelly was left shaken by their decision, feeling that she was suddenly divorced from the support system she had counted on for her entire life. It was a true separation, as Shelly did not speak to her family often because she found it difficult to negotiate the time difference or pay for the transatlantic phone calls. She experienced something akin to a bereavement, and it was even more painful because her parents had actually chosen to abandon her. The sense of precarity Shelly felt was exacerbated by a failing relationship. Following the eventual breakup with her ex-boyfriend, she was “left homeless, sleeping on sofas and nursing a sense of sadness that she felt she wasn’t supposed to have” (75). May agrees that Shelly’s isolation and liminal positioning was truly a wintering. However, from that void state, Shelly began an art project that involved repurposing children’s clothes that were donated from an orphanage. With her parents gone, Shelly too felt orphaned and compelled to take charge of her own destiny, as no one else will.

Ancient traditions such as Gaelic mythology make space for winter. On Samhain, the hag deity Cailleach presides over the dark half of the year before Beltane in May, when Brighde brings in summer. While the Gaelic tradition seeks a cyclical metaphor for life, where spring and winter are codependent, in modern society individuals harbor a more linear depiction of life, whereby they progressively lose their youthful attractiveness and become irrelevant. May espouses the Gaelic view, considering that “we have seasons when we flourish, and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones” (78).

Slumber

May prefers not to go out on dark, winter nights. Instead, she finds that her appetite for sleep increases, as she shifts from her summer average of six-to-seven hours a night to nine hours.

Her friend Hazel Ryan shows May a dormouse, a creature that enters a state of winter hibernation. Although it is in the deepest sleep, it still appears lively. Dormice prepare for hibernation and adapt their rituals according to the severity of the coming winter. From about September, they gorge until they double their bodyweight from about 20 grams to 40 grams. Seasonal shifts and changes to the landscape have made dormice exceptionally vulnerable, as the locations and food sources that made their lifestyle possible are being lost.

May finds that she wakes up in the middle of the night at 3am and catastrophizes. While by day she values exploration and calm, by night she is more conservative, worrying about the security of her life choices. She tries to chase away the dark thoughts with whiskey. When she finds that she still cannot sleep, she turns to creative pursuits. Around 4am, May’s thoughts clear; she loves “this part of the night, the almost-morning” (94). It is the best time to engage in her favorite exploratory type of reading and surrender to the flow of writing without the censorship of her daytime self. May cites historian A. Roger Ekirch, who states that before the Industrial Revolution, the night was divided into two types of sleep. There was the first “dead” sleep, which lasted from evening to early morning, and the second “morning” sleep, which led the sleeper to daybreak (96). Between these two sleep cycles was the watching hour, when visits, love-making, and private conversations took place. May believes that such intimacy was the product of nights that were truly dark, unlike today when the skies are filled with light pollution. In 1996, researcher Thomas Wehr’s study showed that when sleepers were completely deprived of artificial light, their levels of prolactin went up and they became like their forebears in finding the early hours hopeful and reflective.

While one’s personal winters can be fraught with insomnia, individuals are still hungry for a blank period of reflection and contemplation. As winter invites a person to inhabit liminal spaces, one’s task is to be able to welcome and make space for them.