The Unseen Work of Wintering

How quieter, colder seasons can make us more resilient

I have a tendency to imbibe books, taking them into my person and marinating in them. All the better when I’m reading more than one at once and they can start melding together, having their own conversations.  

But my favorite is when I can read a book in season: one on embracing celebration at the peak of summer; one on grief and loss during Lent, or another on gardening to channel my planting energies in the spring. I relish when the words map onto my real life, keeping me contemplating as I walk the dog or drive the kids to school, noting how changes in the weather reflect the changes I sense within.

So it is fitting that I finished the book Wintering by Katherine May (listening on the

Libby app during walks) on this, the first truly cold week of almost-winter. Technically, winter begins on Dec. 21, the shortest day of the year. But I tend to think of the winter solstice—to the degree that I’ve thought of it at all before this book—as the middle of winter, the depths of it, not the beginning. This is the day, after all, that seems almost entirely night. The day the darkness gets deepest. The night before we “turn the year,” as May writes, to welcome a growing dawn.

These days after Thanksgiving have begun to feel like wintering to me, for reasons I’m just beginning to wrap my head around. There are the obvious ones: The anniversary of my mom’s death, now three years ago, falls in the days after Thanksgiving. Then there is the recovery period from cooking and hosting. The deal-finding of Black Friday, followed a feverish brand of Christmas decorating—this year with the “help” of three kids and a dog while my husband wrote a paper. It all leaves me feeling a bit drained just as the days turn colder. It’s also an opportune time to catch a cold.

Perhaps, I thought this year, I am in need of some form of hibernation, some sort of systematic slowing.

In Wintering, May makes a compelling case that humans, like the rest of nature, require seasons of winter in order to flourish. This wintering may be forced upon us by grievous circumstances or it may seem to arrive like a storm, with no obvious precursor or cause. But she doesn’t see wintering as something to get through, once and done. She describes it as a cyclical process—one we can run from or welcome again and again—and one that produces something worthwhile within us.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”¹

The book takes its time observing and describing the severe beauty of a season we so often overlook or push through, hopscotching from one holiday to the next until the spring. Unlike nature, we expect ourselves to produce at the same pace all year. This, even as we watch the grass stop growing and the goldfinches getting less gold.

It wasn’t likely the author’s intention, but this book reminded me of the story a creation groaning for redemption tells and retells us. The darkness leads to dawn. Seeds fall and die and get buried by squirrels and, after a long winter beneath the soil, burst into life (John 12:24). And, even on the coldest of mornings, birds sing.

It also reminded me of the ways we are invited to participate and enter more fully into these seasons, to let the coldness and darkness, the slowness and stillness, do their good work in us and on us.

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Wintering has been marinating in my head with two other books this past month: A Hunger for God by John Piper (on fasting) and the book of James, chapter 1, which is pasted to my shower wall for memorizing. The theme that is emerging from them all—the word that’s been rolling around in my head—is resilience.

I was struck by how practices of embracing the cold in May’s book and of restraint, moderation and deprivation in Piper’s both breed this sort of elasticity into us. Physically, mentally and spiritually. Cold water soaking or even cold showering can reduce inflammation in our brains, combat symptoms of depression, boost our immune systems and relieve pain. Athletes use the cold to help sore muscles heal quickly, making them resilient enough to train again and again. Practices of fasting, on the other hand, seem to have an effect of curbing our appetites—of restraining our cravings for too much of the good things, and for sin, self-indulgence and aggrandizement.

This ability to endure hard things and to “spring back into shape” is something I’ve sensed lacking in me lately. On the back end of an intense season of grief and of writing a book about it, I have felt a little… languid. What’s next? Is there a way to keep up such an intense period of growth? Or should I just take a nap?

Perhaps the answer is yes, all of the above. Winter is, of course, an ideal season for tucking into creature comforts, for soothing and rejuvenating, for tending to the bare-bones basics of our humanity. We tend to sleep more and eat more heartily, to tend to our homes and to our closest relationships.

But there is also an invitation tucked into the colder months. A call to rest and rejuvenate for something. If winter is a cycle of restoration, what is it restoring us for? What are the good works we are called to year ‘round, and how does winter uniquely prepare us for them?

I ask this, and then the words of James 1:2-4 run through my head to partly answer: We can only count it all joy when we meet trials of various kinds because we know that the testing—the cold—we are enduring produces something in us. James calls it steadfastness and, in its fullness, it leaves us better, more complete, less lacking, more resilient in the face of the next trial and the next one. In the face of our actual lives in an actual world with winters.

And so I step out into the cold to walk the dog again. The bite of a gust hits me square in the face, and I think of the words “when you meet trials of various kinds.” What a silly little trial it may seem to walk a dog in the cold. Yet how quickly it produces steadfastness. The more I do it, the more I want to do it. The more I see the birds in their hiding places. The more I feel the cold waking me to the quiet sort of life still flourishing in it.

I turn the faucet from warm to ice-cold for the last few seconds of a shower. I brace for the harshness and rehearse the good to come. I think of the resilience it might be building, of a body that will heal a little faster and regulate heat a little better. And I think of how deeply I want to do that spiritually, how heartily I want to be steadfast, resilient, springy in the face of setbacks.

I want to be quicker to count this little trial and that big one as joy. I want to weigh every bite of the cold against the “full effect” it might be accomplishing in me, deep beneath the frozen soil of my soul.

1. As a British author (hence maximising), May strikes me as somewhat representative of the UK’s post-Christian culture. So I was not necessarily surprised by her desire to pull inspiration from a wide range of religions, cultures and influences (she even goes to Stonehenge for the solstice, so buckle up). I was surprised, though, to see her circling around and hinting at the hope the Christian faith offers in wintry seasons of darkness.