Woman, reWilded #3 – Inviting Winter In

The third of a 7 part series Woman, reWilded on reclaiming cycle wisdom, woman wisdom in winter season.

We need the fallow season of Winter. It’s a time for turning inward for rest, slow replenishment and repair so we can great spring and summer with renewed energy. Doing these deeply unfashionable things – letting go of to-do lists, allowing time to expand to drop into the pause that winter offers, are radical but necessary acts of self preservation.

Winter is not only a season in nature, it’s a state of mind. It’s the dark moon of the inner winter of menstruation and the season of death before rebirth in the life cycle. “Wintering” is the experience of diving deep into dark crevices of our being to acknowledge our darkness and our light. In the words of Victor Frankl, “what is to give light must endure burning” (1)

Reading Katherine May’s beautifully poetic book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times’, I understand why it’s taken me all winter to write about this season. 

However it arrives, winter is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful…wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience and wisdom resides in those who have wintered. (2)

Winter – a state of mind

I’m sitting in the corner of my local laundromat, lulled by the comforting sound of whirring white goods and the fresh smell of just washed wool. In my warm corner, with only a few days left of official winter on the Gold Coast, I’m wondering what is dying in me. 

Instead of enjoying my favourite winter activity, “apricity” – basking with the winter sun on my back while my washing tumbles – I stay inside to deepen this new experience of wintering. 

My life has not worked out the way I thought it would, but rarely does it for anyone. Staying here in the deep rinse cycle, I feel the isolation and aloneness, that this winter has brought and instead of wishing for spring to arrive, I remain in this dark, wishy washy world and allow the colours to bleed into each other.

Wintering through difficult times requires me to befriend my sensitivities, eccentricities and unique way of perceiving the world, with a deep abiding love of holding all of me, even the parts I have exiled into the dark; failure, shame, and rejection are challenging my deepest wound of self-abandonment. 

But I am not wintering alone. In the words of Matt Licata, psycotherapist and author, I am “always, already being held by something infinite and vast” (3). It’s the same intelligence that turns tides and galaxies; the gravitational force that stops me flying off the earth and wires me for connection and healing. It’s the life force embodied by Mother Earth cradling me in her vastness, rocking me gently, unapologetically.

Through wintering with Her, I contact pain along with pleasure, grief with joy so they can both claim space inside me. Not turning away from the aging process, wanting for things to change or resisting what is, I feel a frisson of excitement – could this be a seed of maturity, hard won wisdom, and a kind of death/rebirth? 

A season in life – inner winter of crone and menstruation

Winter is personified in the life cycle as the crone and the death stage. And as things unfold in 2020/21, none of us are untouched by death – death of freedom and hope, death of a way of life, death of family members, death of our hopes and dreams. COVID is for many of us a wintering of extraordinary proportions and continues to be so. 

Into this mix we throw, the daily aches and pains of existence, a stark reminder that the physical body is heading towards the exit sign, despite how much we might slip into resisting menopause, the aging and death process.

Changes in hormones, brains, joints, skin are accelerated in this stressful soup of uncertainty that the new normal presents. Forward progress feels blocked by every lockdown and the only thing left to do is to be; befriend uncertainty and groundlessness and devote ourselves to what makes us feel alive.

The other than human world is my instant healer. Naturalist, John Muir says it in one sentence, “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” I come back younger, older, wiser; rewilded, in my instinct back to self and the natural world. It’s hard wired for us humans to experience this affinity – called biophillia -with the more than human world.

Being in Nature is non-negotiable. Slowing down to listen is non-negotiable. Baths and swimming in the sea, dancing, drinking tea, are non-negotiable. Holding space, witnessing the truth of the other with love is non-negotiable.

A season in nature

I usually experience winter as dry, cold, hard and contracting. But as I accept the gifts that this winter has brought, I loosen my resistance to cold and find flow in the water element associated with winter and the kidneys; soft sensual, inward, nurturing, feminine. Winter is a time to build the fertile Yin essence, store Chi and gain a little weight with warm cooked food and gentle exercise like Qigong. 

Naturally salty foods like seaweed, miso, seafood, slow cooked meats and bitter, steamed winter greens, root vegetables team beautifully with dark purple and red vegetables like beets and adzuki beans (see chart below). Foods and herbal teas high in minerals like spirulina, chlorella, wild blue-green algae and nettle tea are excellent blood and kidney tonics.

Harmony in Hibernation

Withdrawing from the world in winter mirrors the natural world. In the dark of winter, fear and loneliness, emotions associated with the kidneys. can easily arise. Breathing self-confidence and inner strength into the kidneys with the Qigong Emotional Organ Release Meditation, I can balance aloneness alongside warm hearted connection with others. Having truly wintered for the first time in my life, I can invite future winters in with newly acquired wisdom, that “winter is not the death of the life cycle, but it’s crucible” (4).

The Dark Hours of My Being – By: Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs. (5)

 

 

Note

Books have been written about the inner winter of menstruation. If you are still cycling, please see the brilliant book by Lara Owen, Her Blood is Gold, and read my interview Her Blood is Art on how to cherish this time of dark moon to claim space to nurture and nourish self.

References

1. Julia Baird, Phosphoressence: On Awe and Wonder and Things that Sustain You When the World Goes Dark; 2020, Australia, Fourth Estate.
2. Katherine May, Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times; 2020, London, Penguin.
3. Matt Licata, PhD, A Healing Space: Befriending Ourselves in Difficult Times; 2020, USA, Sounds True.
4. Katherine May, Wintering: the Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times; 2020, London, Penguin.
5.https://dailypoetry.me/rilke/the-dark-hours-of-my-being/