Wintering

According to my book tracker, I read Wintering by Katherine May around this time last year. I’m not surprised. I feel as if the last twelve months have been in preparation for this very season. My version of wintering. It’s the first year in a very long time that my wintering season doesn’t coincide with my depression season. It feels a little like being “awake” to the world when you’re not supposed to be. Like what was once foggy and dense is now crisp and clear.

I’m a little unnerved.

But this is good. This is a change! An opportunity! A time to get everything done that I usually can’t during this time of year, right?

No. That’s not what this season is asking of me. It’s not asking me to do more. It’s asking me to be more. And the pathway to that place within me is one of solitude.

“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.” — Hermann Hesse

This quote is the first one in the Into the Lonely Woods Oracle by Lucy Cavendish and Dany May (our spotlighted deck of the month). Clearly, it’s a fitting match to our theme, but more than that, it spoke to me in this season like never before.

As a society, we shy away from embracing isolation, solitude and alone time. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that none of us were quite prepared for the magnitude of isolation and alone time we had to endure. And yet…

There were so many gifts we couldn’t have known existed, either.

And perhaps that’s why this deck, at this time, speaks to me so acutely. Because rather than shy away from that dark and potentially scary place, we can run toward it and, eventually, through it.

As Katherine May says in Wintering,

“Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.”

Here’s the kicker, though…

Being alone is so fucking hard. It takes courage. It takes consistency. It takes a willingness to shut out everyone, even those who mean well. It requires boundary setting and enforcement. It means acting in radical opposition to the overculture.

But in this season, it also means hearing my thoughts so clearly they echo.

“You’re worthy.”

There is no fuzziness, no discounting what it says.

“You’re safe.”

There are no doubts or questioning what is true.

“You’re enough.”

I sobbed when I heard her speak the truth. This inner me who hasn’t had a voice.

It took a long time and many winters to get here, I think. Years and years of fog-laced dreams and barely audible screaming.

But that is the way of the world.

On one of my more wisdom-filled nights of solitude recently, I decided I’d found a key to navigating my life. It started with a rhetorical question, “why, if I’ve wintered so much in my life, am I just now figuring out the meaning of it?” And I realized that the Universe, in all her glory, will put the same damn shit in our way until we learn to face it. And then, guess what? She starts over again with something else you haven’t learned.

This is the way of the world.

Wintering (and solitude as a by-product) is supposed to happen to us. Over and over again, it asks us to go inward and look at the person we spend every single day with. It asks us to get raw and naked with them. To see the flaws but also the beauty. This is how we come to truly know who is when there is no one else around. When the night is dark and we have only our thoughts to guide us to safety.

I grow and learn in solitude. I blossom and transform during midnights while you sleep. I curl up by the fire, letting the hide of my exterior-being rest for a while. In those moments, I am alone. I am so utterly, undeniably alone with myself, that it scares me. Thrills me. Teases me.

But I remember who I am in those moments, and I learn to come back home to myself yet again.