On Wintering Well: On frozen fields, warm bellies, and the wisdom of a sleeping dog
I’ve just started a new book, picked up from my lovely local bookstore a stone’s throw from my office, called Wintering:The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. It’s about getting through the winter, of course, but it’s also a broader metaphor for how to gracefully navigate the fallow periods of our lives. The times when we go into hibernation to regroup, take stock, or simply lick our wounds and find a tender place where we can heal.
The author, Katherine May, describes wintering in this way:
“Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness; perhaps from a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from humiliation or failure.” (p. 9)
I can relate to so much in this definition, including the many ways in which I often feel like an outsider-sometimes a feeling created by others, and more often, a feeling created by and within myself, but which is perhaps even more challenging to overcome.
I can also relate-more deeply than I can express right here-to the sense of humiliation or failure, and the ways in which, when we take on the world and create unrealistically high expectations for ourselves-often in our own heads, unarticulated to others-we are always falling short. This has been true in my workplaces, in my artmaking, and yes, also in my writing.
I, too, feel like I’m wintering. Shedding the layers of a job that no longer served me with no clear answer to what comes next, and living in a sort-of self-imposed exile in a stunning place with so much to offer, but where I nonetheless feel like a profound outsider 90% of the time.
May then tells us:
“Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.” (p. 13)
So what does it mean to winter well, and to allow the crucible to hold? How do we accept and embrace the time of year when the fields are fallow, the land is frozen, and the colors become muted?
I am starting with my senses.
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As I write this missive, I have a hot water bottle in my lap with its own wool cozy, a soft green sweater that’s gentle to the touch, a 10,000 lux light therapy box to my right, and a set of yellow beeswax candles on the table in front of me. I have my favorite tea mug-a chipped red and black affair from Jemez Springs, New Mexico-on the table next to the computer, filled with milky Earl Grey tea, and Tonina Jacobsen is draped on the sofa by the window in front of me.
And I can, and probably should, take more cues from Tonina.
She unapologetically sleeps through the morning, curled up like a cashew on her favorite blanket, with her long white eyebrows fluttering over her front paws, and occasionally opens an eye to acknowledge my presence. Safe and warm in her cocoon, she doesn’t need to justify her slumber, or her desire to sleep until 11 a.m.
She smells of this morning’s breakfast, and fur, and something sweetly grainlike, like barley. Her eyes are soft and relaxed at the corners, and her belly is warm.
As May shares with 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, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs.” (p. 13)
May you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be well on this winter morning, wherever you are.
Originally published at https://ethnographicsongwriting.substack.com on November 8, 2026.
