'Wintering' Review: Rest, Retreat and Renewa
By: Karin Altenberg (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
There will be times, in all our lives, when we find ourselves unraveled, upended, unable. We find no rest. We are not as successful, as on top of things, asloved, as we pretended to be. We have been found out, unmasked. At such times we may prefer to see ourselves as blameless victims rather than the perpetrators of our own pain—the shame will lessen if the cause is external and fixable, rather than self-created.
In "Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times," Katherine May shows us another way to handle our personal winters. "We have seasons when we flourish," she writes, "and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones." In this honest and deeply sympathetic meditation on her own fall through a gap in the "mesh of the everyday world," Ms. May, a British novelist and essayist, proves that there is grace in letting go, stepping back and giving yourself time to repair in the dark.
Her memoir begins at the end of summer, a week before her 40th birthday. Her husband falls dangerously ill and, when he recovers, she is spent. She has found herself in the grips of depression before, but this time she has a young son to care for, and a job that she can't keep up with. She is riddled with anxiety and paranoia—and very hard on herself, even criticizing her own dreams: "What a silly little human I am, to dream such obvious things." And yet, as a veteran at wintering, she knows that she can survive. And she is generous enough to share her strategies for how to find respite in the dark and endure until a new spring arrives.
She is drawn to the North, to the "peaks and troughs of its seasons," and travels to Iceland and Norway in search of cold comforts. She tries (and fails) to re-create the Finnish sauna experience in a British sports center. In mid-December, her search for a way toward the light brings her to the annual Santa Lucia concert at the Swedish Church in London, a rather stilted expat affair, which offers a little solace and just enough light to see by.
The origins of this Swedish winter ritual are fractured and layered. The modern version involves a candle-lit procession, headed by a girl—Santa Lucia—wearing a crown of candles, and her singing attendants dressed up as a variety of creatures, including virgins in white nighties, gingerbread figures, magi carrying stars on sticks, and gray gnomes. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the celebration was canceled across Sweden for the first time in living memory. No bright candles and nighties, no harmony-singing, just the cold December dark. In Sweden's old agricultural calendar, Dec. 13 marked the longest night, when supernatural forces were at play, animals spoke with human voices and the boundaries between the worlds disappeared. This fallow, liminal night was followed by a defiant morning of feasting. Later, the vernacular ritual merged with the Feast of St. Lucy and became a festival of light.
Mythologies and their rituals give sense and rhythm to our lives and mark the passing of the seasons. Ms. May keeps a close eye on the natural world and her own internal weather, paying attention to the “metronome that ticks away its darkest beats.” She cooks, pickles and knits and finds “the sense of a kindness done in the process.” She forces herself to go for walks; she sits on the beach until the tide turns. Her hibernation seems snug at times—blessed with family and friends, a cottage by the sea, a wood-burning stove, a garden—but pain and weariness are not easily healed by home comforts. Late in the year, she has to take her son out of school. He, too, has lost his joy and she decides to teach him how to winter in order to help him through his sadness. Together they witness the winter solstice at England’s most famous Neolithic monument—Stonehenge—where neo-pagans, New Agers and druids gather on Dec. 21 to see the sunrise that marks the end of the longest night. The dawn, when it arrives, is cloudy and gray. The celebrants turn to each other and deliver the mantra “We have turned the year!” but Ms. May describes the experience as a “missed orgasm” with “no distinct moment of release.”
During the pandemic, many of us feel that we have lost our sense of time. Working from home, one day is just like another; holidays and social events are canceled. Time is out of joint; we have lost our rhythm, and the chaos in our chronology makes us perceive life as linear rather than cyclical. Ms. May offers a way of inviting winter, and the steady, familiar comfort of seasons, back into our lives. “O Wind,” Shelley wrote in “Ode to the West Wind,” “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” The gift of winter, Ms. May argues, is that it is irresistible: “Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not.”
Ms. May is a clear-eyed observer and her language is steady, honest and accurate—capturing the sense, the beauty and the latent power of our resting landscapes, of lying fallow. I’m reminded of Seamus Heaney’s line from the poem “Personal Helicon”: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” Her retreat and renewal is a personal experience, generously shared. “A great deal of life will always suck,” she notes, but at the end of 2020, a year when so many of us were forced to slow down, when we were masked and unmasked, “Wintering” encourages us to accept our imperfections and trust in the world, with its cycles of hibernation and regeneration.
Ms. Altenberg was born and raised in southern Sweden and has lived in the U.K. since 1996. She is the author of the novels “Island of Wings” and “Breaking Light.”
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