In my twenties I always regarded Winter as a magical, nostalgic time of long walks through silent forests and across ploughed fields, past the beautiful haunting characteristic silhouettes of Elm trees, like skeletal sailing ships in the fog and snow. I was fairly undaunted by the weather, in spite of being a motorcyclist, and taking ages to warm up after a ride. Later in my thirties and forties, I somehow gradually lost my kinship with Winter, it just seemed like some unbearable inconvenience that restricted my freedom, and involved having to wear lots of clothes.
Then in my fifties I realized that I had somehow disconnected from this part of the seasonal cycle, deemed it somehow less enchanting than the other three seasons, and then of course I got it. I had not been honouring that part of my self, my own cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth. I had been isolating myself in a centrally heated house, not really maintaining my relationship with the wild woods, abandoning it in favour of a facsimile of life, waiting for it to go away. I was looking out the window at weather, at the grey, at the hillside opposite with the hanging woods and then hibernating.
Once I recognized my loss of connection, I could begin to see that naturally each winter I also suffered a death, a surrender enforced on me by the elements. This stripping back of the leaf cover to reveal the bare bones is an important part of the shedding and de-toxing of existence.
This process is described by TS Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’. When the 3 wise men finally encounter the birth of Jesus – (and remember Christmas-Christ’s Birth, was supplanted onto the earlier pagan Winter Solstice festival of Yule) they do not feel joy, but a sense that everything that they believed in was suddenly irrelevant and incompatible with what they had witnessed -
…’were we led all that way for Birth or Death?
There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt.
I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; t
his Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us,
like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here,
in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
It is slightly ironic that Eliot uses this poem to express his discomfort at converting to the Anglican Church, and I am usurping it back to describe a more basic, primal/native practice. Nature facilitates our transformation, both by example and by subtle influence: we are deprived of the light and warmth of the Sun. But just as the Sun King is killed in the Summer and rises afresh each Winter Solstice, we too can align ourselves with the Natural Order, in harmony and reverence. It’s in our blood, our waters.
By consciously choosing to surrender and meet that death with complete equanimity and humility, Winter became my friend again. In stead of struggling through and usually getting ill along the way, praying for April to arrive, I just relaxed, acknowledged the deep wisdom of Nature, and saw how I was being stripped away of all that didn’t serve me, even though the good old ego was clinging on and crying out – “but I need that”.
For the first time, this winter I went swimming in the river on the Solstice, and swimming in the sea on New Year’s Day. My attitude to winter has changed and sure winters ain’t what they used to be, but we can all go out into those cold woods with naked, glistening branches, sleeping giants with juices building up underground slowly watching the returning light, waiting for the signals.
In Winter I die, and that’s the way it’s meant to be.
