Day 1 - Wintering

Wintering

The winter solstice is a week away. I invite you to settle into the season with me these next few days and pay attention to how you are feeling in your mind and in your body.

I blame it on last month's transition from daylight savings time, but my body is having a rough time this year. I'm going to bed earlier and find it harder to get out of bed in the morning for Rico's daily walk. Maybe it’s the frost on the ground or the geese honking overhead as they fly south but I want to be someplace else too. I wish I could hibernate from the political turmoil or burrow into bed and shut out the daily noise of 2021.

Katherine May was recently interviewed by Krista Tippet in an episode of On Being where they discussed her book entitled Wintering. This passage conveys beautifully the strange state of being I find myself in. If you click the link that follows, you can hear Katherine in her own voice. I promise you, three minutes of listening will be well rewarded.

A surprising cluster of novels and fairy tales are set in the snow. Our knowledge of winter is a fragment of childhood, almost innate. All the careful preparations that animals make to endure the cold, foodless months; hibernation and migration, deciduous trees dropping leaves. This is no accident. The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of spring and summer, but in winter, we witness the full glory of nature’s flourishing in lean times.

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 they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing 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.

It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order. Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it’s essential.

Click this link to hear the excerpt read by the author:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvOiI2ly-t0

I’ll conclude today be sharing a practice familiar to anyone who has spent time in contemplative prayer. The psalmist writes, “Be still and know that I am God.”

Sit in quiet with these words. Wrap them around you like a blanket.

Pause for a moment or two between each phrase.

Be still and know that I am God.

Be still and know that I am.

Be still and know.

Be still.

Be.