Dear friends,
I lived in
Australia for four years in my twenties and have visited many times since then.
It’s a country I love. But, try as I did, I was never able to adapt to December
being the summer. The first year, it was a novelty, but as the years went by, I
noticed a disconnect: I was so used to December and January being cold
months.
It’s not that I
always loved a cold January: for me it can be a month of struggle. But somehow,
a swelteringly hot January just made me feel unsure, rather than comforted. The
seasonal cycle — summer/winter/autumn/spring — was somehow connected with
another way of feeling seasoned: I’d associated experiences with the time, and
my expectations of the weather.
Our On Being episode this
week is
a re-airing of Krista’s conversation with the British author Katherine May whose book Wintering has been a comfort
to so many. “Wintering,” as Katherine describes it, is an experience, not a
season, already letting us know that her usage of this term is less about snow,
and more about what’s happening in your inner world. “Some winters happen in
the sun,” she writes, and “wintering is a metaphor for those phases in our life
when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come
at any time, in any season, in any weather; that it has nothing to do with the
physical cold.”
For her,
“wintering” is an experience of finding yourself out-of-sync, perhaps feeling
abandoned, like you’ve fallen through the cracks. Part of the intuition of
writing about such experiences, for Katherine May, is community-making: once
you speak about such times in your life, you’ll find others, too, have similar
seasons.
Katherine
speaks about how a diagnosis of autism at the age of 38 informs so much of her
writing. Autism isn’t some rare human experience, she says, and then notes how
many people fall through the cracks in recognizing autism: middle class white
boys are often the ones who are written about. “If you’re poor, you’re more
likely to get a diagnosis of being naughty… if you’re Black, you have very
little chance of getting an autism diagnosis at all. And if you’re a girl ...
there’s actually quite a lot of active prejudice against the idea that girls
can be autistic at all.” The experience of living through this, and eventually
getting a diagnosis in her late thirties, led to her “expertise in wintering.”
If, in the
annual season of winter, plants and animals learn to adapt — performing
extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through — then perhaps we, who
go through internal seasons in our lives might also find a way to recognize
such seasons and not fight them, knowing that “life is fundamentally cyclical.”
Katherine May speaks of sadness as a necessity, both personally and as a
parent, and offers wisdom about how important it is to learn how to be with
ourselves — and others — in seasons of sadness. This isn’t done alone: “we need
friends … who tolerate our gloom, and who allow us to be weak for a while when we’re
finding our feet again.”
Our Poetry Unbound episodes this week
portray two experiences of winter: one personal, one seasonal. On Monday’s
episode, we heard Yehoshua November’s “2AM, and the
Rabbinical Students Stand in Their Bathrobes,” a poem whose title sets the scene for a
middle-of-the-night event where firefighters seek the cause of an alarm. It’s
not a fire, though; rather a student who is distressed, and who set the alarm
as a manifestation of their own worry. The poem’s intuition is to go deeper
than just the story, considering the question of God’s presence “amongst those
plagued by sadness.” Friday’s poem is Alberto Ríos’ “December Morning
in the Desert,”
a poem that delights in the shock of cold as the poet observes the sky, the
stars, rejoices and recoils at the enormity of the universes’ sound, then
locates that within the tiny hearts of bees, and wasps, and moths, and
dragonflies.
Friends,
whatever season you are in — in the world, and in your world — we wish you the
wisdom of knowing the season, of knowing what’s growing, of company, and
kindness.
Beir bua,
