Preparing
for Winter
“In
our relentlessly busy contemporary world, we are forever trying to defer the
onset of winter. We don’t ever dare to feel its full bite, and we don’t dare to
show the way that it ravages us. An occasional sharp wintering would do us
good.”
Katherine
May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, p.13;
Riverhead Books, 2020)
Katherine
May wrote Wintering to explore her personal journey through hard times
and to show that these times are universal and archetypal. She describes winter
as “a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off
from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast
into the role of an outsider.” Winter, as May writes about it, can result
from illness or accident, from a loss of something or someone dear to you. Sometimes
we are forced to confront things in our lives that we have been working hard to
ignore, and the facing of it forces us into a period of exile. It presents a
liminal space during which we are not who we were, but we don’t yet know who we
will become. We feel ourselves to be foreigners in a foreign land. Though May wrote
this book before Covid 19 waylaid the whole world, it could describe what we
are enduring now—right here, at the end of summer.
At
least, some of us are still sheltering at home almost all the time. We have
small groups of individuals that are within our “covid bubble,” people who are
vaccinated or have had covid already, and we do not go out, or put ourselves
into group settings. Alabama is one of the states where the Delta variant is
ravaging entire families—the carpenter who is doing some work for me had 20
members of his family sick at the same time. One family I know has already lost
three people to it. And yet, today Bryant Denny stadium will hold 100,000
people for the University of Alabama’s first home game. We are in deep denial
of the winter that is upon us.
As you
know, it is the nature of viruses to mutate to adapt to our efforts to
eliminate them. As long as various mutations are circulating among us, we will
have this endless winter. It’s not personal. It’s just the truth. Viruses do
this. They don’t care if you are a Christian, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, or how
you voted in the last election. They don’t care about your politics, or your
age, or your value to the human race. For them, survival depends upon invading
your body and commandeering your cells for their own use. And they are very
good at doing just that. The longer they are in circulation, the better they
get at mutating to ensure their own survival. So, winter it will be until all
of us are sick, dead, or vaccinated. It’s just that simple.
One of
the things that Katherine May writes about in her book is the difference
between how other animals prepare for winter as opposed to human animals. Other
creatures forage, they lay on fat, and their fur thickens. They reinforce their
nests and dens to make them warmer and better protected from the elements. They
know how to rest in a way the slows down their body functions and puts them
into deep sleep—a hibernation. They don’t fight the oncoming of the cold—they expect
it and prepare for it.
We, on the other hand,
speed up. We turn up the heat, and pull out the warm clothes, and just keep
right on rushing around like fire ants. The other day, I sat at a traffic light
and watched two cars run it in succession, narrowly missing a collision. Where
do we need to get to that’s so important, we impulsively risk our lives for it?
It’s 64 degrees in
Birmingham this morning. Winter is coming. Whether it is the winter of our despair,
or the winter of our awakening, remains to be seen. It’s entirely up to us.
According to May, a good, sharp wintering would do us good. What do you think?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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