Preparing to Winter Well

All mindfulness drop-ins continue today and next week as usual, and I am teaching an online day retreat on Saturday 14th November - still spaces on that for anyone who would like to join.
For this week's MindLetter, inspired by work happening at UoE, I write about preparing for our darkest season...

Preparing to Winter Well

There’s something about a really terrible cold that gets a person thinking about winter. I thought I could brush it off at first – vitamin C, hot water bottle, the energy of term-time – but the virus had inescapable gravity, its own immoveable schedule. As, in mid-October, the government told us to prepare for emergencies – batteries in the cupboard, dog food piled in the bathroom, muscles primed for winding up the radio – I went to bed with a temperature.

This was no storm passing through. The song of the cold was singing in my macrophages and cytokines, my scratchy throat and waves of floor-dropping fatigue. A friend took charge of walking the dog, and I took to my grab bag: paracetamol and hot lemon, kimchi and warm socks, fairy lights and the radio. Consigned beneath the duvet for several days, and too exhausted to read, I found myself involuntarily cocooned.

This was a week or so before the clock change, and, sequestered from clock time, I found myself slipping into a different kind. I attuned to a sense of the turning day, watched the sunlight move around the house. Now the sun beamed bright on my snoozing skin; now golden light spilled across the kitchen table; there were the stars, coming out at dusk. Then, as if my body had summoned the warmth from the air, transplanted it into my own inflammatory heat, it turned wintry outside. One morning, wrapped up tight to totter out with Hope, I saw the first frost coating the lawn, those unmistakeable fronds of ice. I stood in my layers over pyjamas and marvelled. As my bug crooned me into a slower tempo, the earth, too, was singing, a whisper of what was to come.

The virus receded, and I got back to my desk; but I was reminded of my brief hibernation as, last week, I dived into the Wintering Well student experience toolkit. This project is a collaboration between Geosciences and EFI, building on work by human geographers Hester Parr and Hayden Lorimer on Seasonal Affective Disorder. These Scottish months are often a shock for newly-arriving international students and staff – rapid fluency is required in the different thermal properties of jeans vs. joggers vs. woollen trousers – but I too, with my mere English blood, remember walking into Mountain Warehouse in Fort Kinnaird and saying, ‘what’s the warmest coat you’ve got?’

We all have different inclinations towards winter prepping, but there is something about thinking of the season now, while the fox still trots plump across paths liberally strewn with autumnal fruit, that honours both the turning of the earth to come and the tender skin of our own sensibilities. Whether we like it or not, the clocks have changed, and the days are darkening. Winter, like a bad cold, has a certain immovability. Who among us hasn’t sworn their way across the Meadows in a too-thin coat, defying the gales, raging at the ice, or otherwise meekly assumed the inevitability of chilled fingers and cold bones?  Yet there is an alternative relationship to the impending authority of winter, and my hunch is that it’s in looking and listening, a certain kind of respectful acceptance, and seeking whatever most delightful synergy you can find of winter’s poetic and practical possibilities.

I’ll be offering some Wintering Well sessions in the new year for both staff and students, but meanwhile, borrowing from the toolkit’s ABC rubric for a season-and-light-aware approach to the season, here are some ideas for preparing to winter.

A - Take Advantage of whatever light is Available

I like this because of how it invites us to attune, as I found myself doing during my grim cold, to the natural waning and waxing of light within a day. There’s a big difference between getting through The Winter – that insurmountable ice-faced monolith – and experiencing one wintery day at a time, looking for its time of sun up and sun down, placing yourself within its cosmic spin.

We can begin that attuning now: with the clock change, these mornings are briefly brighter. Walk out in the daylight if you can, or sit by a window over breakfast. It’s so tempting to stay indoors all day when the wind is howling or we were blown into campus with a rain shower; but venture round the block for ten minutes at lunch, if only to look up at the sky in pearly grey, Farrow and Ball writ live, and marvel at the bright colours on the autumn trees. Bring those colours indoors, a leaf in a vase or a conker on a desk, and think about the miracle of colour itself, which is light incarnate.

B – Brighten outlook: take part in social times that foster Belonging, Become creative

I am a big one for book clubs, and we host a couple in the Chaplaincy. What better way to hunker down while the weather wuthers, than to dive into a Book with a Bunch of fellow travellers? The Light is a Right Wintering Well handbook suggests a number of titles for winter, but this period of autumn gloaming has its own canon. Try Ali Smith’s Autumn with friends, Donna Tartt’s Secret History campus in the fall, or Fiona Mozley’s spooky Elmet. Post-Halloween, eerie reads are best shared with others, over tea in a warm café, or on the sofas upstairs in the Chaplaincy.

Then: write your own spool of words, a flight-of-fancy ghost story or a poem, a letter to a friend from winters past; or doodle an autumn scene in pen or pastel. Let it be spontaneous, the embodiment of the verb essayer – to try. When winter comes, we will need permission to be less than perfect, to slow our output, and to daydream while our roots take rest. Practise now by allowing whatever flows out the nib of your pen to be imperfectly whatever it is.

C - Celebrate winter’s seasonality in time and place, its Cultural specificities and moments of transition

They are my compass in a blizzard: Nigel Slater’s Christmas Chronicles, my November and December night-time reading. In these months I savour the quality of the paper between my husks of hands, picture the Christmas cake for twelve, the frosted, twinkling German markets. This year, for the first time in my life, I have earmarked a November Saturday to make plum pudding. I’ve no idea who will eat it – and it’s folly, surely, to attempt to take it on the train – but it’s my eighth Scottish winter, and I know by now that it really does help to go all in. Give me Advent, the Solstice, the Twelve Days of Christmas: I’ll take them all, store them up in my cupboard with the batteries and the dog food and the paracetamol, so that when the Edinburgh winds come howling, and the day is darker than it is light, I can hold my husks of hands with those of Winter Past and Present.

Here's to stocking up our cupboards of heart, mind, and belonging.

Warm wishes,

Kitty