It is a couple of days past Imbolc, an older name for Candlemas, the Christian holiday for the symbolic return of the light.  Where I live, this means sunset is now at 5:30 instead of 4:30.  That hour of extra light means a lot in a place where near constant cloudcover means that it sometimes feels dark at 2pm in the middle of winter.

Having moved from somewhere very hot and sunny, I worried somewhat about my ability to winter over in a place like the Pacific Northwest.  Then again, my favorite winter days back in the South were always the ones that precisely mimicked the weather here: cold, gray, windy, and rainy.  I hoped that my strange love of the grayness would follow me and endure, and it has.  I am actually disappointed when the Sun shines for too many days in a row, if for no other reason than I know it’s not supposed to do that during this time of the year.

It’s also because the Sun is an intrusion upon my desire to hibernate on a certain level.  I’ve been through a great deal of adversity in my life that has seen me give a great deal of time and energy to others, but very rarely the same level of attention given to myself.  My mind has let me know in no uncertain terms that this is a state of existence that will no longer be tolerated.  In a flash of synchronicity, I have also gotten the very strong message from the Universe that I don’t have to anymore.

This is a very odd place for me to be in, suspended liminally between where as well as who I was and where I’m going, wherever that may be.  I am being told that my current job is being, not doing, and like so many in the West, I have no idea how to do that.  I am subconsciously programmed to go, go, go and do, do, do, no rest for the wicked or the weary.  And rest is precisely what I need more than anything else right now: physically, mentally, and spiritually.

Instead of seeing this as a restriction upon my life that I have to rail against, I’m doing my best to see it as a way of opening up freedoms I have heretofore been unfamiliar with, or at least have forgotten.  Being told by the Universe that you are no longer allowed to do certain things means that time and energy is available to do other things that have almost certainly been pushed off to the side as being wastes of that time and energy.  For me, this means giving myself permission to allow time for things like reading, a once-happy pasttime that fell by the wayside when I had a baby (in 2003!).

I went looking for “restful reading recommendations” on the internet one day, and the popular book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times popped up.  It seemed relevant to my current life, so I got it.  I was unprepared for the parallels between the author’s life and my own, to the extent that I felt like the Universe itself said, “here, read this one.”  It resonates so deeply that, despite not even being done with it yet, I was compelled to write this.

For wintering is exactly what I’m doing right now, and may be for some time, given some of the life events I am recovering from.  I may feel differently in a few months when the trees bud and the flowers bloom, but for now, I am perfectly content to spend my days wrapped in flannel and slippers, reading books, writing and doing art, and drinking coffee on the porch with my husband while we watch the Steller’s jays eat peanuts and the sparrows pick for seed.  A small part of me wants to say that I should be doing something more productive and useful, but a much larger part of me knows that isn’t what I need right now.  Like a wintertime tree whose energy is largely stored safely in the roots, I am living below ground and out of sight of others for the most part, and that suits me just fine.  I am drained and overwhelmed by anything more than a very small group of people.  I participate in small discussion groups at my Unitarian Universalist church, but I do not attend service.  Church for me lies beneath the trees and next to the streams and rivers where hopefully the sound of rustling leaves and running water is the only thing I can hear.  It is the quieter sounds of nature that are best at drowning out the sometimes cacophonous noises of my own mind.

As this process of wintering has settled in, I am finding it impossible to engage in any activity that threatens to disturb the tentative inner peace I am slowly establishing.  I’m discovering that by forcing myself to ignore real-world issues that I cannot do anything about, I’m wanting to engage in more activities that I can’t even think about when I’m stressed about all that real-world bullshit.  Things like keeping my house clean and cooking.  Not because that’s my domestic job as “the lady of the house”, but because I want to, because I enjoy it.  Cooking is an alchemy of the spirit that also feeds the body as well as the mind when it’s done right.  Keeping house isn’t just an act of tidying for me, it’s an act of removing chaotic energy no less significant than having a feng shui expert identify the trouble spots in your home.  When I’m done, it doesn’t just look and smell clean, it feels clean.

I’m only about halfway done with the book, but it has blurred my vision with tears more than once and is peppered with highlighted passages.  I suspect it will continue to do so, which I welcome.  One of the most terrible things about the human need to overwinter in the West is that our culture holds such a thing in active disdain.  The inability to constantly do, go, and produce is looked down upon as a weakness, even a moral failing that one should be castigated for, let alone sympathized with.  This leaves someone like me feeling freakish and lonely, which is different from being alone.  The word “alone” is supposed to mean “all one”, referring to the connectivity one feels with the world when one feels complete.  Feeling lonely is pretty much the opposite of that: feeling like you aren’t connected to anyone because you feel so different and freakish.

Books like this and May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude are blessed shatterers of this isolation, reminding the otherwise lonely winterers that they aren’t freaks, that this is normal, and that there are others like them.  I have no doubt that as I continue to read the book, I will discover that her winter ended and Spring finally came, as I hope the same happens to me.  I don’t know how long my winter will be, whether it will abate with the arrival of warmth and light later in the year or if I have some time yet to spend in the roots.  Part of me wants to sleep for about a year.  It doesn’t care about anything but resting and staying as far away from our glass-and-steel encrusted “real world” as possible.  That world feels illusory and damaging to me, and I’d much rather focus on what’s really important.

For the first time in my 51 years, that includes myself.