The clocks have gone back, the days feel short and access to sunlight can be scarce. There can be comfort in the familiar rhythm of the seasons and the opportunity to hunker down and get cosy. But we don’t all feel this way. Many people find their mood is negatively affected by the lack of light – a condition known as Seasonal Affective Disorder. Not all of us experience the place we live as cosy or welcoming.
Some time ago, I bought Katherine May’s book Wintering as a present for a friend. For some reason or another, now lost to the mists of time, I never gave her the book and it ended up on my shelf, unread and occupying a sort of mine-but-not-really-mine twilight zone. A few weeks ago, as the leaves were turning and nights drawing in, I took down the book and started to read.
An unusual blend of memoir, nature writing and travelogue, Wintering explores how humans have survived and celebrated the coldest, darkest time of year. It also offers the idea of winter as a state of mind to which we will all be subject from time to time: a period perhaps of grief, depression, disappointment or illness when it is necessary to retreat from the world, rest and start to rebuild our depleted resources.
This is a book of reflection rather than prescription, but if May is advocating anything, it is to not resist the dark, but to meet it, accept it, prepare for it and perhaps try to see some value in what it brings. This may be an enforced pause, a slowing down or the chance to notice something new in the world when sunnier distractions and consolations are removed.
“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.”
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