Perhaps it’s due to hitting middle age or the fact that this past year was a seemingly unrelenting wave of medical emergencies, drowning my family in emergency room visits and intense periods of recovery, that for the first time in my life I’m embracing winter’s darkness. Although I’m a winter person — the season of my birth and lover of snow — I’ve often struggled with winter’s lack of sunshine. Short of gnashing my teeth, I’d sink into a seasonal depression and would try to distract myself to hurry up and get on with winter by praying for snow and anxiously counting down the days until winter solstice and the sun would slowly begin to creep longer and longer into my fitful waking hours.
Not this year. I’m fully embracing what British author Katherine May describes as “wintering,” a period of life she identifies as “a season in the cold.” It’s not always aligned with the months of November through March/April/May (if you happen to live in northwest Montana and spring is always just out of reach) but corresponds to what she calls a fallow period, a time of transition usually coupled with grief, sometimes painful but also necessary. We can’t always live in an endless summer and in the immortal phrase from Game of Thrones: winter is coming. May encourages us to invite wintering. She writes, “Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience. And wisdom resides in those who have wintered.” In my more youthful days when I was always in a rush for my real life to begin, like when ski season began and my slopeside waitressing job would also start, leaving me a little less broke that I’d rush through my days, moving as quickly as I could through any discomfort heightened by the darkening days.
Whether I like it or not, this year as forced me to sit in that discomfort, whether that meant soothing a loved one waking up from surgery or trying to find the words to describe, without terrifying my children, what a particular diagnosis meant and how healing doesn’t follow a pattern like the instructions to one of their sets of Legos. I hesitate to take a deep breath for there is still about 28 or so days left of the year so there’s still time for another catastrophe to shatter our days, but by embracing this prolonged season of wintering, and not racing away from the shadows, I feel like we still have enough patience to endure whatever may greet us on a given day, welcome or not.
This coming winter will also be the first one in 40 years that I won’t be able to ski. While I’ve suffered a handful of injuries, usually the result of ski racing, through the ski season, I’ve never missed an entire winter of skiing. But this is the year that my ankle needs to be surgically rebuilt. So, I will soon sit with my discomfort for longer than I’d like and will have to live vicariously through my two children who fiercely love, like I do, the way they feel when sliding downhill on this magical substance we call snow. Instead of pushing through the injury – a mess of torn ligaments and bone spurs from decades of repeated injuries – I’ve been preparing myself for this fallow period. I can’t rush healing and instead of fighting against the dark, I’ve started to acclimatize.
Living in a mountain culture town, winter typically means chasing after powder days and tracking storms. This year, winter will go from a noun to a verb. I will be wintering, and certainly scanning the skies for snowflakes, but I’m also working toward a sense of settling, befriending pain and discomfort, waiting not for untracked lines but rather, a flourishing that can emerge during the season’s cold and lean times.