wintering

There’s a song on our Christmas playlist called Winter Skin by Jars of Clay. It’s been playing in my head over the last few weeks, slowly turning around and around with ideas of wintering, presence, and partnered with the perpetual feeling of being cold…. the lyrics simply go like this:

We put on our winter skin, our winter skin, and walk,
We put on our winter skin, our winter skin, and walk,
And we watch the snowfall.

I don’t really mind the winter, though it does last a bit longer than I’d choose most years. And winters where we currently live are certainly nothing compared to those we’ve experienced in Bruce County growing up, or even during the year Nathan and I lived in London, where the snow-belt dumps are hefty indeed.

I’m also not a natural lover of winter though. I run cold even in regular life… amplified even more so these days, and while I enjoy playing in the snow with the kids, I was never into any winter sports or activities that made the season particularly desirable. I love the pretty falling snow for Christmas, and even through January, but generally winter feels like an inevitable part of being Canadian that we just have to make it through each year before getting back to the kind of active, outdoor, together living that we actually want.

But I’ve been sitting lately with the idea of wintering. There’s a book by Katherine May (which I have not actually read yet…) that is called Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

And it feels like a good thing to wonder about right now - what would it mean, to winter on purpose?
What would it look like to embrace the gift of wintering as a space of retreat and renewal? To not just survive this season, expecting the life that comes afterwards; but instead to be present to what it happening within in? Right now in the dead of winter?

And somehow, these questions around wintering are tied to others…
What does it feel like to be truly and fully yourself?
When was the last time you remember feeling like the full version of who you are?
What could it be like to live settled and sure in your own skin?

These musings and more have been percolating in my brain, and then today I picked up a book I’ve been reading by Lore Ferguson Wilbert called The Understory, and she was giving voice to many of the same thoughts and questions. I love God’s kindness and grace in affirming the things that he’s drawing us to through repetition. I am prone to doubt and question my own perspective, and I always feel God’s love and mercy for me specifically when he affirms and confirms through different sources that what I’m sensing is good and from him.
Wilbert’s book is centered on the lessons we can learn from the forest floor, a poetic invitation to rootedness and resilience, and I’d love to share some of what resonated as I soaked in her wisdom and learnings today.

She writes about a season of sabbatical in her own life and how her spiritual director posed this question:
What if you were to look at this wintertime as a time of nonproduction of any kind? What if God’s invitation to you is not to anticipate what this time will be for you, but instead to simply allow it to unfold?

She goes on to talk about the wide earth underneath the canopy of snow, and how even the descriptor of ‘waiting’ feels too active for describing the ground, and too focussed on what was to come after. Rather than waiting, the wintery earth, is simply being. It’s dormant, but very much alive. It’s not holding still, or waiting for life to return, but rather, very much in the middle of an important and necessary part of living itself.
This, I think, is the invitation of wintering.

Honestly, it continues to feel hard to hold this season with wonder and expectation. There are so many days are that just hard and long and the same. There is so much about it that is unwanted, unknown, and seemingly unending. And yet, here again, is the mystery and the hope of what is happening underneath the surface. I worry about missing the good because I’m consumed by the difficulty. But gently, faithfully, Jesus reminds me that I can simply be. That there’s not a right and wrong way to exist in this space, but that I am invited to be as I am, and to trust that there is much happening, in, through, and around me that is all very much alive and well.

Even when it feels covered over. Even when it feels unseen. There is life here. There is goodness here.
There is enough for what is needed here.

Wilbert goes on in her writing to address the oft repeated notion of living as if we might die tomorrow - many have asked ‘What would you change about your life if you knew you only had hours, days, months to live?’
But Wilbert suggests a different approach; she proposes that our flourishing, our finding, our fullness will come as we give our attention to the right now, to today, to this very moment, instead of focusing on what may or may not happen tomorrow. “Today I am here.”
She continues:
"I think sometimes the reason we are told to keep death ever before us is because life is so hard to hold in our hands. Death reminds us that we are finite and finished, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But life, what life is and can be and should be is more complicated, less finished, and therefore scarier to see. Death seems easier to grasp.

…the work of being here and not there or not yet there is good work. It is courageous work. It is hard work. And it is not death work. It is resurrection work. It is the work of remembering what it means to be “magnificently oneself.”

God’s work was to make us in his image, and our work is to keep his shape while wandering around the mornings and evenings of our lives. It is to be gloriously who we are, all the way through, all the way down, and to be gloriously where we are, all the way here, cast in the likeness of the Creator of the universe.”

To be gloriously who we are. To be gloriously where we are.
I think this is the gift of winter. When things are quieter, slower, softer. When it’s hushed and covered over and darker than normal. When there’s room and wandering and wondering. When there’s openness and resting and nothing in particular to do and no place in particular to be.
Do we know how to be here? Do we know how to cultivate and hold this kind of space for ourselves?

We often, often, do not choose this kind of space.
Instead, it can be the gift of a season we may not have selected for ourselves. It is maybe the awareness of death, of being undone, that reminds us what it is to live, what it is to be.
What would it look like for you to be gloriously who and where you are right now?
In the midst of this very season?

I have been sick with a cold this past week or so, in addition to the recovery from a chemo round.
It has been extra not fun to try and battle back the congestion and weariness with not much of an immune system, and a desire to simply feel well for a few sparse days before I head back into it again.
We also lost power randomly for a few hours one day this week and for such a brief window there was even less than normal to do - all electronics, appliances etc not working, my phone battery quickly close to dead, my mental ability to focus on anything fairly questionable lol - all I could do was be.
It was weird. It was uncomfortable. It was good.
And it was very short-lived. But it was exactly the kind of space I need to sit with these questions.

Although it’s in a poem about summertime :), Mary Oliver asks, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
How will you live, lovely ones? How will you be gloriously you and gloriously here?
How will you say yes to the presence and purposes of God that are uniquely for you to be with in this season?

And if your life doesn’t allow you to ask these questions, if there’s no room for winter, for quiet, for discomfort enough to open up these kinds of spaces - then I gently wonder if you’re really being you?
The you that you were created to be.
The you that’s found in the wintering.

In terms of a health update, there isn’t much new to report I don’t think.
I thoroughly enjoyed a bit of a break from treatment over the Christmas holidays. It was challenging to return to the chemo rhythms after feeling well and myself for a couple of weeks, but thankfully there are not too many more to go at this point. I have come through round ten of twelve. It will be mid-February by the time the effects of the twelfth round wraps-up, and then I’m looking forward to another pause as I shift to just the immunotherapy for at least a couple of months.

The reminders to be present, settled, and released in the midst of this season are potent for my own soul. There is a kind of frenetic energy to being ‘almost done’ that feels somehow both a like a rush to the finish, and then also an impending undoing when it will be finally okay to release all the holding of this chemo rhythm.

There’s not much to do, but there continues to be a lot of feelings about that in the midst.
So here I am. Here I am.
Wilbert lays out a lovely breath prayer for holding this exact space:
Inhale: Here I am.
Exhale: And You are here with me.

This morning before all this thinking became semi-tangible words, I was taking some of my slightly better head space to pray and give thanks for the gifts of this week. And this is where my prayers landed:
Today Jesus -
I put my hope in you.
I surrender my way to you.
I commit my path to you.
I rejoice in you.
I will be found in you.

Feels like a good place to hunker in and just be.

Blessings to you all, friends. Thank you, thank you for your continued prayers, encouragement, and love.
L xo