On Wintering

Have we lost sight of one of the things that most guide our lives — the seasons? It’s easy to think so. As I write this, it’s a cool 40°F (5°C) outside; it isn’t as cold as the frigid Midwestern winter, but it’s low enough that I’d suffer if I were out too long without a good coat and gloves. It’s 9:25 at night, awfully late to be writing given that I have no fire — my office is lit by artificial electricity and kept at room temperature, and if it weren’t for the occasional draft, I’d hardly know from inside my house that it’s winter at all. And yet the seasons go on affecting us, Katherine May argues in her hybrid memoir. We live two kinds of season at once: the planetary seasons each year, and the seasons our lives pass through. May charts her most recent winter — one of many — by drawing on the world outdoors, asking what we can learn from how others experience winter. She recounts Samhain, which inaugurates the winter, and saunas, saints, and the solstice; she plunges into the English Channel in February, weighs homeschooling her son, and engages the more-than-human world, with an especially interesting chapter on how bees survive the winter — we tend to think of them as hard workers or egalitarians, but the larger lesson is in staying warm under hostile conditions.

May’s winter, like mine, began with a series of health crises. First her husband came down with appendicitis, and she feared she might lose him; then she herself fell ill, took time off from her university, and ultimately left the position over the course of the winter. The funny thing about trying to avoid the seasonal cycles is that, like it or not, they make sure we hear them — in May’s case, it seems to me, through an intense burnout. Her retreat gave her the chance to slow down and ground herself in the larger world, to unload the burden she’d been carrying and return to the needs she’d long neglected. Modern “life” has a way of impeding the very fundamentals we need to survive: connection, rest, presence, and, perhaps most of all, a sense of peace. Wintering came at the right moment — it was released in 2020, but May had gone through her own winter the year before, so the book became a roadmap for thousands navigating an increasingly difficult time.

Though I found the Covid-19 pandemic a hard stretch of personal isolation, it in no way resembled what I went through later. In late December 2022, like May’s husband, I came down with intense stomach pains. At first the doctor feared hepatitis — my blood work showed astronomically high liver readings, and a second round of tests an inflamed pancreas — but that wasn’t it: after a visit to the radiologist, I was sent to the hospital for emergency surgery, my gallbladder in the process of melting down. The surgery went well, with no immediate complications, but for weeks and months afterward I felt uncharacteristically weak, with spells of dizziness, sudden shooting pains through my face, and an inability to engage with the world. A dietician gave me a food plan and supplements that made no difference, and at the second appointment it was clear there was an absorption issue, so I was sent to a gastroenterologist for an endoscopy and colonoscopy. They found chronic gastritis, stretches of inflammation in my colon, and a fungal infection in my esophagus, and after a triple dose of antibiotics and a course of antifungals I gradually recovered over months. Even so, my life was riddled with major setbacks, culminating in my departure from a PhD program, and my belief that things would soon improve turned out to be an illusion; the whole multi-crisis launched me into an identity crisis that took me more than a year to get through. Altogether, my deepest winter lasted more than a year and a half. Things are better now — in spite of the weather outdoors, my internal world feels like a flourishing spring.

I wish I’d read Wintering sooner, though I’m not sure I’d have been ready for it. Like May, I had to unload some of the heaviest burdens in my life and, in the open space that left, learn to re-inhabit myself; now, in spring, I can look at my values, goals, and aspirations with more sober, intentional eyes. In the depths of winter I felt as though I were walking through the most savage blizzard, unable to see in front of me or behind, lost deep in a boreal forest. The storm has let up some; flowers are beginning to bloom, and I hear a few bees buzzing, and I’m glad they made it through the season with me. May’s book wasn’t a roadmap for me the way it was for so many others, but it was endlessly validating — to look at another person, whom I don’t know personally, and be able to say, “Oh, you went through this too?”, and to learn about her experience, let me put my own in perspective; when the next winter comes, I can pray it won’t be as bad as the last and brace myself accordingly. To anyone going through their own personal winter right now: you are not alone. What you feel now will pass, but you have to give it time; as hard as it is to see, the other side is waiting for you — you don’t know where you’re going yet, but you’re in the process of becoming.

Winter isn’t a period of death; it’s a period of transformation. St. John of the Cross spoke of the “dark night of the soul”; the alchemists spoke of the nigredo, the blackening, as the fundamental moment of transmutation; Hades, or Pluto, is associated with winter, desolation, and the afterlife, and is also responsible for transformation — astrologically, Pluto transforms. The flora and fauna seem to fade in winter, but they too are transforming. That message — transformation — lies at the heart of Wintering. If you feel like you’re in the thick of it, take some time to walk with Katherine May; she’ll guide you softly and help you make better sense of what you’re going through. And even if your life isn’t in a winter right now, she offers a map to help you prepare for when winter, inevitably, comes again.