As we are poised between seasons, now is the time to prepare and ready ourselves to emerge into spring, suggests Katherine May, author of the best-selling book, Wintering
Instead of spring cleaning this year, I’m redecorating my study. I have a Pinterest board full of ideas and a vision that involves clear surfaces, extra bookshelves, an armchair with plumped cushions and an awful lot of plants. This is very far from the current state of affairs (books stacked sideways, carrier bags destined for the charity shop, stained coffee mugs and, for reasons I don’t quite understand, the whole family’s collection of wellies). But spring is coming, and I’m an optimistic soul, as well as an untidy one.
Now is the time to do it. The Gaelic festival of Imbolc arrives on the first day of February, when snowdrops are showing. It marks the end of winter, a time when the ice would traditionally melt, and its debris could finally be cleared away. But it is also the beginning of spring, when the first lambs are born. At Imbolc, the ewes are pregnant, and the year is pregnant, too, full of expectation and promise.
Imbolc is the last beat of winter, a time to get ready for better things to come. It always arrives just at the moment when I’m ready to stretch my wings again, and to engage with the outside world after several months of sheltering indoors away from the cold.
In my book, Wintering, I write about the fallow periods of life when we feel cut off from the rest of the world, perhaps after an illness, a period of grief, or a rejection that floors us for a season. I’ve wintered many times in my life, through periods of depression and ill health, and through times when I could feel change coming, but didn’t know where to turn next. Over the years, I learned that nature could show me a way through these times. From hibernating dormice and trees shedding their leaves, to the female reindeer who keep their antlers until spring so they can defend their young, I discovered that winter is a time to mass our energies, to rest, repair and recuperate, and to pare life back to its essentials until we are ready to emerge again, remade.
The most important thing that nature teaches us is that wintering is a cycle: the cold visits us over and over across the course of our lives, and we can’t avoid it. When we endure a personal winter, it’s not a failure. It is normal. I’ve come to believe that these winters are important times of personal transformation, even if they are unbearably painful. They are moments of metamorphosis, when we fall through the cracks of life for a while, and spend time working through the agonies of change.
But I also believe that we can learn to cherish our winters. Not enjoy them exactly – that might be asking too much – but recognise them for what they are and sink into them. In the process of writing Wintering, I learned the pleasures of swimming in the ice-cold sea, and discovered just how much colour could be found in the woods at midwinter. I let the cold bite, but I also defended against it, lighting a series of bonfires in my back garden, and snuggling up on the sofa with my favourite children’s novels. I retreated as much as I could, and let some of my social ties fall slack for a while.
I rested. In the middle of a relentlessly busy life, it was hard to do. It seemed indulgent to ask for the right to keep my calendar empty and to spend time doing simple things like baking and reading, rather than competing and achieving. But in the space it made, I realised that I had been on the run since my son was born six years earlier, relentlessly trying to show the world I still had something to give it. I was trying to work like a machine – teaching until I was exhausted, putting everyone else’s needs before my own, writing my books in the tiniest of gaps left in my day – without ever stopping to refuel. Winter helped me to understand that a dormant period was essential. And if I hadn’t recognised that, winter would come for me anyway. My only job was to surrender.
So when I’m approaching Imbolc, I’m not really thinking about cleaning, because I never could get terribly interested in dusting and hoovering. Instead, I’m thinking about moving to the next phase in my life. The revitalised study is at the top of my list because I’ve finished one book and I’m ready to start a new one. Now is exactly the right time to imagine the space I’d like to write it in: calmer, less cluttered. It’s all I hope for the inside of my mind, too, but that particular wish may have to wait.
I’m not convinced that spring cleaning was ever really about tidying anyway – it’s surely more about dreaming. When we clear away the dust of a long winter, it’s an act of imagination, sowing the seeds of a life yet to come. This starts with a simple act of hope: I will create order. I can’t make everything perfect, but I can gain control over my tiny corner of the world.
In between bouts with my study, I’m tackling the freezer, too, gradually eating my way through all the weird things I’ve frozen while in the grip of winter madness. Portions of pumpkin soup provide a week of decent lunches; a sad tub of cut-price blueberries are stirred into a batch of muffins, and become glorious. Other things – a pasta bake I hated the first time around; an aubergine stew that I know will have turned mushy – go straight into the bin. In the bottom drawer, I find a bag of frozen rosehips that I gathered in an October frenzy, feeling like I was saving them from rotting on the bough. Today, I simmer them with sugar and water, and pass them through a sieve to make a coral pink cordial, full – I assure myself, as I shake it with gin – of vitamin C. After all, the last efficiencies of winter don’t have to be joyless.
This piece was originally published in The Simple Things, issue 92. You can order a copy of Wintering here
