We are approaching the midwinter. It’s a time to hibernate, a time for rest and restoration, a time for going inward so that new seeds can germinate. Winter may be cold (as I write I’m wrapped in shirt, jumper and extra cardigan, topped with a thick dressing gown, wool beret and fingerless gloves) but it can also be a fertile period of replenishment of our resources and allowing creative ideas and new energy to germinate. We retreat to the cave—or the fireside—because going inwards is a way to re-centre, rebalance and eventually move outward again. The cyclical rhythm of the year is repeated in cycles of life, in the monthly phases of the moon, in our creative lives and writing… As Albert Camus puts it

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

A mind of winter

Writing in his book Winter, Adam Gopnik speaks of winter as being about retreat and loss:

Human beings make metaphors as naturally as bees make honey, and one of the most natural metaphors we make is of winter as a time of abandonment  and retreat. The oldest metaphors for winter are all metaphors of loss.

But this loss—the bareness of the earth, the paring back of every tree, the starkness of frost, the contractions of life to the indoors—they are a particular type of loss… one that is rooted in going to ground in order to flourish again. In the losses are new beginnings—some not yet imagined. Gopnik acknowledges this when he discusses how a love of winter’s beauty perhaps comes more easily to those of us who live in an era when the winter isn’t a threat to our survival (though, sadly, this might not be the case for the vulnerable and elderly who can’t afford heating). He goes on:

Wallace Stevens, in his poem “The Snow Man”, called this new  feeling “a mind of winter,” … A mind of winter, a mind for winter, not sensing the season as a loss of warmth and light, … but ready to respond to it as a positive, and even purifying, presence of something else.

This mind of and for winter is, for Stevens, one of stripping back ego and illusion, a purifying of vision that might become the blank canvass for something… even if we can’t yet see what the something might be.

“The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

A mind for stillness

To cultivate such a mind, one in which we hone back far enough to ‘listen to the snow’ and see the tabula rasa, requires us to work with this season. We have to go inwards, become quiet, find some stillness. We have to stop running around madly and let being rather than doing become the rhythm. We have to linger and listen as Annie Dillard does in this exquisite passage on winter Solstice from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

Today is the winter solstice. The planet tilts just so to its star, lists and holds circling in a fixed tension between veering and longing, spins helpless, exalted, in and out of that fleet blazing  touch. Last night … I stood at the window, … I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent, and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf … Is this mystery or coyness? A cast-iron bell hung from the arch of my rib cage; when I stirred it rang, or it tolled, a long syllable pulsing ripples up my lungs and down the gritty sap inside my bones, and I couldn’t make it out; I felt the voiced vowel like a sigh or a note, but couldn’t catch the consonant that might shape it into sense. I wrenched myself from the window and stepped outside.

Then she muses on how death is so integral to our images of winter. The last leaves whirl down and there is decay. And yet—

Somewhere, everywhere, there is a gap … The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so  dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. […]

Go up into the gaps. If you can find them … This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you. [Go into] … any gap at all, and you’ll come back … transformed in a way you may not have bargained for …

This is so redolent of Wallace Stevens last verse:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

When we cultivate a mind of winter and allow ourselves some time of real stillness and depth, we can’t predict what direction it might take us in. Whatever transformation we might have been seeking, we will only know it when it’s happened—change is never what we imagine it to be. Think of major life events—committing to a relationship, moving house, becoming an adult or a parent or aging—it’s never how we thought it would be. And yet, in the letting go of one cycle for the next, it will be new and a place of learning and growth. It will be a different story.

In the stillness we can go back to the blank page and allow ourselves to be surprised by what emerges. The bleak midwinter is a time for going back to the heart and seeing what might arise—perhaps

• inspiration—through story, poetry, journalling and creativity, through a variety of artistic practices
• intuition—through deep rest, through listening to dreams, listening to land we live on, listening to the body
• invocation—as we emerge eventually and call in the help we need for the next cycle in the journey, as we begin to find the next story…

A mind for rekindling the light

For all of us there will come a last moment of winter in this body when the story of who we are gives way to the story of others who will come after us. Winter is a metaphor for death, but life itself continues to cycle.

Writing in Northern Farm, in the late 60s, the essayist Henry Beston writes about the ancient festival of winter Solstice as being centred not on the darkness of the shortest day, but

Fire and the great living sun — perhaps it  would be well to honor again these two great aspects of the flame. It might help us to remember the meaning of fire … as a symbol. As never before, our world needs warmth in its cold, metallic heart, warmth to go on and face what has been made of human life, warmth to remain humane and kind.

We retreat and find some stillness not in order to stagnate, but in order to clear the ground for a new thing to grow. We withdraw to the hearth in order to remember that the light will return. The mind of winter isn’t one of perpetual frozenness and darkness, but one of honouring the cycles of the year, our lives and our creativity, whilst also knowing that we will (when spring comes both seasonally and metaphorically) move outwatds again, with hope and radical kindness. This is how we become a different story.