Wintering

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

― Katherine May, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times

Take this sharing of mine as an opportunity to practice wintering. Before you continue reading, I invite you to pause. Make yourself a warm beverage, cozy up by the fire if you can or under a cozy blanket, and settle in to drink these warming words.

Those of us in temperate climates experience winter annually on a practical level, but we all experience our own seasons of winter throughout life, often irrelevant to the seasons outside. Yet both versions of winter are often avoided or ignored in western culture. A discomfort to evade.

Cold, dark, gloomy, quiet. These sensory experiences can evoke emotions we may otherwise not give voice, which is easy to do in a season of summer. Summer is the opposite of winter, yet it has parallels. It is an extreme experience. Hot, bright, sunny, lively. It can become overwhelming if not balanced by the other seasons. A mid summer rain is appreciated as a breath of fresh air, a deep drink of sustenance for all of life. Just as so, winter too can be overpowering. The darkness can engulf you. The quiet stillness becomes suffocating. A surprise warm sunny day in the depths of winter can enliven a spirit, providing a small spark of life as a reminder that winter is not forever. The light will return, both in the sky and your mind.

Winter is not forever. It is a season that comes and goes. Whether it’s a season of the calendar year or a season of life, it is always temporary. This ebb and flow must always be so, because life cannot exist solely in winter, just as life cannot exist solely in summer. There is a balance to this earth that is the foundation of life. It is written so deeply within our bodies that we can easily ignore it yet we cannot avoid it. Because the longer you avoid it, the further removed you become from that balance, and the harder it will be to return to it.

Winter in the wild: the green ones

Death and decay are as natural as birth and growth. Winter is a time of death. The plant kingdom is our greatest teacher of the cycles of death and rebirth. At the onset of winter, a symphony of rituals take place amongst the green folk. Seeds mature where flowers once bloomed... succulent green stalks wither to brown sticks, their energy sent down into the roots within the soil… Leaves drop from their branches, dancing their way down to blanket the Earth as protection and nourishment. What at first glance appears to be the end, is actually a wondrous juxtaposition of death and rebirth. The decay of summers rein is essential for the slow reawakening come spring. As the darkness settles over the temperate Earth, what appears to be a time of silent stillness is actually a time of slow, deep work.

Before new life can emerge, a period of rest and remediation must endure.

The seeds of last year’s blooms will eventually join the fallen leaves on the bare earth, carrying with them the coding of new life, where they remain dormant until a genetically predetermined period of stratification occurs, giving them the signal to germinate. Exposure to a prolonged period of cold temperatures being one of the most common, only to crack open when the warmth of the new season summons their return. In other words, many seeds rely on winter to grow. Without it, they may never emerge.

And so the cycles continue.

What is the teaching here?

How can we apply this ancient process to our lives?

Plants teach us that death is not an end, it is part of a whole. While the post death experience of our bodies remains a mystery, our lives are full of death and rebirth. We all have seasons of great blooming, but those blooms will always inevitably fade. No flower can bloom forever. Our seeds need room to grow.

Our flowers are bright and alluring, it can be difficult to let them go. If we allow them to fade as they must, and nurture the seeds that grow in their place, in due time, they will germinate and grow stronger than before, lessons of the season they endured now coded in their DNA; a new resilience emanating from the winter that gave them the cues necessary to emerge.

Yet we live in a culture that does not honor the cycles of life. We are culturally void of winter. Our obsession is with summer, we crave the constant high. We’ve created an artificial world that is stuck in summer. Days that never end with artificial lighting. Climate controlled indoor spaces always set to the ideal ambient temperature. A constant rush of noisy, high speed movement in cars, planes, and trains. Schedules packed full year round.

The allure is reasonable. Who wouldn’t want to bloom forever? We are going against nature by avoiding our natural periods of winter. This obsession is burning us. We are tired, so deeply tired. So we medicate, with caffeine and sleeping drugs and white noise to get us through the quiet night. And we distract ourselves with lights and sounds and fast pace.

Despite these conditions we’ve created, winter still winds its way into our lives, and its stark contrast can feel devastating if not mindfully reckoned with. If we honor winters place in our lives, we can unfurl our new growth and bloom once more.

How can we intentionally weave winter into our lives in ways that nourish and restore us the way it should? Perhaps the easiest way to start is to honor the elemental season of winter. I’d like to share with you some suggestions, rituals, and practices that may support you through the winter months that are based on human traditions dating long before modern life swallowed the world.

Honoring the Winter Solstice

Before you shew me away with your presumption of some pagan beliefs (unless you’re into that), I’ll remind you that the Solstices and Equinoxes are simply calendar markers noting the longest and shortest days of the year. They actually are our markers for the change in the seasons. These are incredibly useful for agriculture, as day length directly impacts the growth of plants. Given that agriculture is the basis of civilization, humans around the world have developed rituals and traditions revolving around these dates to pay homage to them.  If it strikes you fancy to follow the traditions of a culture already in practice, by all means, please do. But here I will offer some suggestions based off of the essence of what these calendar markers represent.

There are two solstices, one summer, one winter. The summer is the longest day of the year, the winter is the shortest. The winter solstice happens every December 21st. Fun fact, it is said that western Christmas is celebrated on December 25th because this is the week the pagans in Europe celebrated the solstice, and the churches dominating their cultures did not accept their pagan traditions, so they named December 25th Christmas, to celebrate Jesus’s birthday, though his actual birthday is thought to be sometime between January and April. This act was to redirect people’s traditions away from the pagan rituals around the solstice and convert them to the practices of the church.

While the essence of the winter solstice remains in our western Christmas traditions, (think feasts, roasting food over a fire, gathering around a fire, sipping warm beverages) our fast-paced consumer life distracts us from truly soaking up its potential medicine.

What is the medicine of the Winter Solstice? Let’s turn to the wild ones.

If you walk through the forest on the winter solstice, chances are you won’t see much life happening. Many creatures hibernate in this season. Others must survive on the scant food that remains. But one thing that always stands out to me of a winter forest versus a summer forest, is the quiet. A winter forest is oh so quiet. The noise of summer, tree frogs, cicadas, crickets, bees, has come to a near halt. It’s so quiet, if you wander on a snowy day, you can actually hear the snow falling. Life is all around, but it’s slowed significantly.

There are always 24 hours in a day, which means the shortest day of the year has the longest night. As creatures of the day, if we followed the natural light, we would only have about 9.5 hours of daylight on the winter solstice. Without artificial lighting, our winter days would be severely limited by the sheer shortness of daylight. But perhaps this is actually a good practice. It would force us to fill our days a little less, and probably sleep a little more.

So, let the darkness engulf you. Yes. Let it turn you inward toward your soul. Take the opportunity to tend your inner fire. Notice. Tune in. Quiet your own world, so you can hear the answers to your inner questions.

What fuels you?

What drains you?

What no longer serves you?

What are your current needs?

What do you wish to prioritize?

Where do you feel tension in your life?

How can you address that tension in a healthy way?

What do you have control over and what must you accept that cannot change?

You may resonate with these questions, or you may have your own version of them more attuned to your life. The point is to ask them to yourself. By giving yourself space to pause and reflect, you create opportunities for growth. When we live our lives in a constant state of summer, running from one thing to the next, it’s easier to ignore signals our bodies may be giving us that something isn’t working right. When we are constantly overstimulated and distracted, our bodies become numb, and we live mindlessly, even robotic.

But despite the ways that modern western culture tries to industrialize us, treats us like machines, the truth is we are sentient, emotional creatures. We are deeply wired to live in relationship with the natural world, and the further we push ourselves from it, the less human we become. So whatever season your life is in right now, I encourage you to allow yourself to tune into the winter outside that is actively settling over us.

Shut down your electronics earlier in the evening, turn down your lights after dark, give yourself one day each week of a cleared schedule if you can, eat warming, nourishing, seasonal foods (think roots, mineral rich broths, fermented vegetables and grains, and dark leafy greens), and find time to pause and reflect. Whether it’s an hour or 20 minutes, make time for yourself to go inward. However that looks for you. Whether it’s journaling, quiet contemplation, meditation, baking, running. Give yourself time to think in a relaxed, calm environment. And most importantly, spend quality time with other people. Because we aren’t meant to live this life alone, not even in winter, which can be isolating if we aren’t mindful. But it can also be deeply nourishing and filling if we allow it.

We must honor winters essential role in the cycle of life. Summer cannot exist forever, and neither can winter. Even the tropics have their own version of winter; the dry and rainy season. May you learn to winter well, and look to our wild green relatives for guidance. They’ve been dancing winters song for millennia. So when spring does come, and it will, you may bloom bright like a spring beauty poking through the forest floor.

“May you grow still enough to hear the small noises earth makes in preparing for the long sleep of winter, so that you yourself may grow calm and grounded deep with-in. May you grow still enough to hear the trickling of water seeping into the ground, so that your soul may be softened and healed, and guided in its flow. May you grow still enough to hear the splintering of starlight in the winter sky and the roar at earth’s fiery core. May you grow still enough to hear the stir of a single snowflake in the air, so that your inner silence may turn into hushed expectation.”

— Brother David Steindl-Rast

Enjoy this gallery of some of my favorite photographs honoring the beauty of plants wintering in the wild.

All photos and writing are original. No AI was used in the creation of this content.