The Long & Beautiful Journey of Winter’s End

Musings on empty bellies, cold nights, and dreams of spring

T.S. Eliot said April is the cruelest month, but I’d argue he overshot a bit. One could say that honor belongs to February.

This is such a strange time of year. January is often abysmal for me. There are the post-holiday blues, the long, long nights that don’t seem to relent much even after the solstice, and the cultural pressure to get organized, lose ten pounds, and become the “best version of yourself” at a time when it’s dark and cold and I don’t want to do anything but curl up under a blanket. It’s not cruel — it’s almost unbearable.

Then comes February, and suddenly, you realize the light is changing. The nights are just a little bit shorter. In the late afternoons, if you look closely enough, you’ll see that the sunlight, still holding on to its wintry grayish tones, now displays the faintest hint of that summer gold. You find crocuses pushing up from beneath the snow. You see ducks and geese frolicking in the sky above.

You know it’s coming — spring.

But it’s also still so cold. The days still feel short as they clamber slowly to the vernal equinox. And you know there is more snow, more storms to come before you can call winter over.

It’s wonderful. It’s awful. It’s…cruel.

It’s not that I hate winter. I actually don’t.

What I hate about it is the way our culture forces us to ignore it. I hate that there’s an expectation to get up at the same time every morning and go out for a walk (or run, if you’re more ambitious and have better knees than I do), even if it’s 18 degrees and there’s ice everywhere. I hate that we start off the new year with such overwhelming expectations of how much we’re going to improve ourselves and our lives — for god’s sake, I’m so tired in January. I don’t want to think of all that.

And I hate that even when it snows and snows and snows, we’re supposed to completely ignore the weather (and our own safety), get in our car, and go skidding across town to all our regular haunts, when honestly, I just want to stay home for a few days until everything melts.

I suspect I’d be a lot more amiable in winter if I could just follow my animal instincts that tell me to sleep later, exercise at midday when the sun is warmest, do my usual work, nurture myself with creative projects, and take naps. Don’t ask me to clean out my closet right now. Or start a hardcore workout routine. I’ll be thrilled to do that in April, but not now.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that winter is for rest. No, not total hibernation (though sometimes that sounds lovely), but just an abbreviated and slower version of our usual routine with extra sleep thrown in.

Winter is for contemplation. It’s a time to “be” more than “do.” We can’t “do” all the time, despite what our culture would have us believe. In order to have the inspiration we need, the creative impulses, and hell, just the energy to pursue it all, we have to have time and space in which to be.

That is what I love most about winter. It’s a pocket in time and space — a gift for us to engage in quiet contemplation. The only problem is, our culture doesn’t see it that way.

It’s a hard thing to make peace with — trying to follow the urging of my biological impulses while somehow juggling the expectations of a culture that would have me deny that.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about the January full moon, called the Wolf Moon and how this time of year used to be called wulf monath by the Saxons, partly because it was a time when game was scarce and wolves howled and howled through the night in their hunger. And because it began a long and relentless hunting season which is partly to blame for the extinction of wild wolves in the United Kingdom.

There’s something about this that grounds me so deeply into this time of year. The hunger. The hunters being hunted. The long nights. The dark woods.

At the end of winter, even when we can sense the promise of spring, we still feel this brutal stretch of time in our very bones. We’re tired of our hands always feeling cold. We’re tired of having to get up before the sun is out. The daily walks, even in the midday sun can feel like a fight when the biting wind is blowing right in your face, pushing against your forward momentum.

And somehow, even though we have refrigerators full of food and grocery stores just a few miles away, we are hungry, too. Our bodies remember the empty end-of-winter bellies of our ancestors, and that biological, mysterious memory can be just as uncomfortable as actual hunger.

It’s amazing to me how differently I feel when the calendar turns to February. The exhaustion and ancient hunger of January begin to slide off me like an old snake skin. I love the old Celtic holiday of Imbolc, which coincides with the Christian holiday of Candlemas — I literally can feel the light that these holidays celebrate. I always have a candle burning and spend the evenings of February 1st and 2nd journaling, meditating, and celebrating.

I know it’s not over — winter has not ended here, not by a long shot. We will have more snow at some point, most likely. There will be frigid wind storms. There will be endless freezes at night.

But February holds both the end of winter’s desolation and the beginning of spring’s promise.

I try to help myself remember that by being extra kind to myself this month.

• I buy myself a Valentine’s Day gift early in the month — just a little indulgence, a practice of self-love.
• I look through my gardening books and decide what seeds to buy. I make lists of all the things I need to do in the garden before planting time.
• I read a lot. I work on my novels. I look at people’s photography and art for inspiration.
• I make an effort to stop working after dinner and settle myself into a pile of blankets to work on editing my photography or to complete a few rows of whatever is currently on my knitting needles.

And my favorite thing…I slowly empty my freezer. Every June, when I have more strawberries than I can eat, I set aside as much as possible in the freezer. And once February comes, I start to eat them, a little at a time. It’s my way of reminding myself of the sweetness of spring that is coming.

Right now, my once-bursting freezer is almost half empty. I feel so blessed that I can pull out my frozen strawberries and eat those unbelievably sweet fruits at the end of this long, cold winter. And by the time they are gone, it’ll be almost time for them to grow again…

So yes, it is a strangely cruel time of year. So much promise yet so much cold. So much hope yet so much darkness. And when it’s all over, not all of us will be launched into spring. March is a bitter month in my neck of the woods. In fact, I won’t see the gentle days of warmth and fecundity until May.

And yet…I feel a strange peace at this time of year. I know the bulk of winter is behind me. The stress of the holidays is long over. The demands of warmer days are far ahead of me. And there are still June strawberries in my freezer.

There’s a long way to go until the cold subsides. Until my hands don’t feel so damn icy anymore. Until the days are gloriously longer and golden with that sunlight so unique to spring and summer.

But I’ll be okay until then. Even the cruelest month can be kind, if we look carefully.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

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