We will be meeting at the Enigma Tap at 7:30pm on Sunday.
You what?! I hear you say. Wintering/winter but we’ve just entered Spring.
Yes, the environmental season of winter has ended in the UK and Spring is here. Yet as well as living through the environmental winter we all experience physical, mental, emotional and spiritual winters too. These winters can happen at anytime. Winters of ill health, bereavement and grief, anxiety and depression, doubt and fear. Winters that creep up quietly or come blustering in like the wildest winter blizzard. Some winters seem to last for what seems forever and others for a small period of time. Yet all winters have a start, middle and end. Winter comes, it’s icy cold winds blowing through us and life, bringing with it the need to retreat, to hibernate, to allow it to pass by.
Yet there is so much to learn in the winter and during our time of wintering.
And with each winter; yes we’ll all experience more than one, and sometimes maybe two or three winters at the same time; just as the seasonal winter comes around every year, we’ll learn from each and share what we learnt to others who come into a wintering season in they life.
Katherine May writes in her book, ‘Wintering: The power to rest and retreat in difficult times’, in a way that is so creatively beautiful. She doesn’t just write about the seasonal winter and what it can teach us nor does she just write about her own personal wintering and what she’s learned. Katherine writes about it all. Starting with the Indian Summer she experienced in September and when her personal wintering also began, she takes us through the months of October to March. Teaching the reader about what nature, animals, people and different cultures can teach us about winter and wintering well. From being in the Artic Circle where there is only a few hours of day light to experience the winter solstice at Stonehenge. There is so much to consider and lean.
Katherine talks about the fact that we are just not raised to recognise, understand or acknowledge its inevitably. Winter and our personal wintering will happen but…
” in our winter, a transformation happens. We read, and we work, and we problem solved, and we found new solutions. We changed our focus away from pushing through the normal life and towards making a new one. When everything is broken, everything is also up for grabs. That’s the gift of winter; it’s irresistible. Change will happen in its wake, whether we like it or not. We can come out of it wearing a different coat.”
Katherine teaches us that instead of using our energy to push against our personal winters, we are to welcome them in to feel the winter and acknowledge what that means for us. To occupy the liminal spaces it offers to inhabit, to listen to winter asking us to be more careful with our energies and to rest until spring.
For me, Katherine really caught my attention when she was telling of her experience attending the Winter Solstice at Stonehenge. While she was there with those who were Druids, New Age Travellers, women in medieval gowns and a man in a silver space suit to describe a few of the 100s of people who were there. This is what Katherine writes of that experience:
“We’re interlopers here, but I’m not sure what interlopers means in this context. There’s certainly no sense in which we’re not welcome, and the crowd is so diverse for us to truly stand out. If simply wanting to spend the Solstice in close proximity to the stones is enough, of a reason, then we’re not interlopers at all. I just don’t know how to worship in this way.”
How do we worship in our wintering? I’ve found over the years of wintering I have learnt to stop using my energy to control and fight against the cold. But to welcome it in, acknowledge its existence and to befriend its presence. This in turn as taught me that during my wintering I’m to rest, to be still and know that God has me. Its taken a life time to learn but it makes wintering more sustainable, I now understand what spiritual clothes I need to wear like just being still, not ignoring what is going on but just sitting with it in both my mind, emotions and my body. I attend to what physical needs I must do to ensure self-care during these times, good sleep, rest and loving, being gentle with myself.
Wintering in hard but we can learn how to winter well and when we do..
” You’ll find wisdom in your winter and once it’s over, it’s our responsibility to pass it on. And in return it’s our responsibility to listen to those who have wintered before us. It’s an exchange of gifts in which nobody loses out”
Questions:
- Where is the coldest place you have ever been?
- What do you like and don’t like about winter?
- What changes and transformation could we see in winter and wintering?
- How do we worship in wintering?
- What do we think the liminal spaces look like that wintering offers for us to occupy?
