How to rest in uncertainties and embrace the dark.
 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
I am not what you'd call a winter person. I like a snow day as much as the next human, but the biting temperatures, the long shadows, the light draining out of the sky at what only a month or two ago we called midafternoon — all of it makes me kind of sad. But I adapt. Friends know the odds of my doing something social or "fun" before the Ides of March are slim to none. I become a domestic creature. I wake up early and light candles. I ruminate more and read more, too. I watch bleak Eastern European art films on the Criterion Channel, make soup and sleep. In this way, I get by. |
There is a note of gratitude in all this. Those of us who have a place to eat and sleep can adapt in relative safety. Others must find ways to outsmart and outlast the winter to survive. |
In the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice — the precise arrival of its coldest, darkest season — will occur at 4:48 p.m. E.S.T. today. Despite the fact that this has happened on a strict astronomical schedule since the beginning of time, the solstice seems to take many of us each year by a sort of gloomy surprise. |
In an essay this week, our contributing writer Margaret Renkl marks the coming of the winter with a reflection on the place that she knows best: her own backyard. She does this by thinking of the solstice not as the shortest day but as the longest night and by embracing the uncertainty of its darkness and of everything we cannot and do not see. |
She also shows us what can happen when our attention turns from our own needs and survival to the needs and survival of others, to what you or I might do to help all creatures great and small get through long, hard winters. |
I'm going to bet you have your own form of this process — what the British author Katherine May in her 2020 book calls "wintering" — a turning inward that can be difficult and lonely but also necessary and restorative. "Wintering," she writes, "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." She, as others have done, frames the act of "rest and retreat" as a sort of resistance to a culture that routinely drives us to ceaseless productivity. |
As Margaret's essay makes clear, night and the darkness that comes with it can be actual and metaphorical at once. Our desire to know, to flood all of life's dark corners with light, may just be a hedge against our fear of uncertainty. But our knowing can never be complete. What goes on in the dark still goes on. It may be frightening, painful, meaningful or miraculous. It is still life. |
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