A popular view of the cycle of the year, moving from season to season, is that each season has its own particular mood and meaning: Spring representing growth, summer representing the joy of peak achievement, autumn representing loss, and winter representing the death of everything the rest of the year has brought us. There’s good reason for each of these standard interpretations, and yet, there’s more to any season than just the conventional story. Each season contains an opportunity for emotional conflict, as we struggle to bring the different tones of the season into focus.
Winter, for example, doesn’t just represent the end of things. It also can stand for a reprieve from the expectations for vigorous external productivity. As author Katherine May explains in her book Wintering, at the core of the emotion of wintering is an acceptance of the terms of the metaphorical season of winter, with the sense that the stark cold is a period offers the opportunity for inner growth. “We must learn to invite the winter in,” she writes. New leaves and shoots don’t burst into view in the winter, but the meristematic tissue in buds and branches readies itself for the performance to come.
Wintering is thus an emotion that’s related to but distinct from the emotion of wintercearig, the bleak feeling of exposure to the freezing brutality of the dark periods of life. While wintercearig feels beaten down and numb, the feeling wintering of is more philosophical, taking the time allowed by the loss of light and warmth to reconsider what matters.
Like wintercearig, wintering hurts. May tells us that, “However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet, it is also inevitable.” Wintering is not the holly jolly feeling desperately pursued by those who insist that the darkness of December to be “the most wonderful time of the year”. Wintering is painful, but its pain can provide insight, if we are observant enough to encounter it at the proper angle.
“Wisdom resides in those who have wintered,” May writes.
As with wintercearig, the experience of wintering can come at any time of the year. Frost and darkness are more often metaphorical than literal. Though we are lucky if we have 80 winters in our lives, May explains, “We live through a thousand winters in our lives.”
“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,” May writes, but in wintering, frustration and alienation can be interpreted as a liminal moment, instead of a permanent new reality. “Perhaps you’re in a period of transition, and have temporarily fallen between worlds.”
Wintering is a surrender and embrace of impermanence, an acceptance of moving forward, with the hope that the loss we suffer from now will lead to a more seasoned approach to life.
