On Wintering
I’ve been circling an uncomfortable fact in this newsletter for about a year: I’ve loved quarantine. There are people and places I miss desperately, and I have days where all I want to do is get back in bed and cry and/or smash breakable things in a rage. Obviously. Still, all the things quarantine has forced me to do—stay home, slow down, feel my feelings, detach from terrible things that are outside my control, take responsibility for how I spend my time—are things I needed to do. Having the space to do them has been a gift, but not an easy one. Much harder, however, would have been ignoring quarantine’s invitation to live differently. It would have been so much more painful to pretend everything was fine and try to carry on like I did before. Quarantine opened a door, and I walked through.
“There are gaps in the mesh, of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else,” writes Katherine May in her book Wintering. That’s how a wintering starts. “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.” Wintering can be sparked by a death, a birth, a break-up, an illness, an accident, a mistake. “However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable.” We will all winter, many times, whether we like it or not. Our mistake, May says, is thinking we can avoid it, or pretend it’s not happening. “We must stop believing that these times in our lives are somehow silly, a failure of nerve, a lack of willpower. We must stop trying to ignore them or dispose of them. They are real, and they are asking something of us. We must learn to invite the winter in. We may never choose to winter, but we can choose how.”
May wrote Wintering long before the pandemic, about a wintering in her life kicked off by her husband suddenly falling dangerously sick. Soon, May herself developed a chronic illness and quit her stable university job. Her young son also plunged into a crisis, refusing to submit to the strictures of school. It was horrible, and stressful, and sad. Before the wintering, however, May had been ground into dust by overwork, and school was snuffing out her son’s true self. “Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife,” May writes. “We changed our focus away from pushing through with normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is up for grabs.”
The subtitle of Wintering is The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, and it’s no surprise that coziness, pickling, long walks, ritual, and children’s books are all featured heavily in how May understands and copes with her wintering. In the UK, where May lives, Wintering came out a few weeks before the first lockdown. In the US, it came out in November 2020. I know this isn’t the world May wanted her book to be born into. Winterings are about so much more than one bad year. But to say it resonates right now is a serious understatement. Wintering didn’t change what I was doing in quarantine. It gave it a name, and it gave me permission to embrace it.
More next week, on how our two books of the year intertwine. (Here’s Part 1.)
Note: Obviously I think you should read Wintering, stat. But here’s a podcast interview with May if you want some more highlights.