Wintering: a practice (part 1)

How to make the most of liminal times in the cold season

Thank you for being here! The seventh edition of the Atlas is a special three parts newsletter. As a podcast and community set up to explore building a home in the “in-between” states of life, this month we are observing a month of “Wintering”. Traversing the transitions that the cold brings, letting go of the spring energy of production for a moment. The last weekend of January in pre-industrial cultures, was the last moment before renewal commenced on February 1st. Today, tomorrow and Sunday we will share with you a journey in three chapters of a personal experience with wintering, followed by three curated prompts to reflect on your own: an artistic experiment with ice, a silent retreat and a voyage to the Arctic circle.

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This is for everyone who doesn’t feel like January 1st is ever really the beginning of anything. But rather a blurred boundary between last year and the eternal return of something.

In the past few years, especially after I broke the cycle of employed office life for an independent one, the fallacy of a commercially imposed beginning of the year started making a disturbing noise in my head.

It turned into a loud paralyzing thought, like a constant thud, that would make my whole body cringe every time the calendar turned: who decided I must feel ready now?

On January 1st, I rather feel like my heart is racing while all I want to do is hide from the rest of the world and take my time to cozy up and transition to something else.

The anti-social truth is that I perennially feel less ready than the others at resolutions, plans, and new investments in this time.

This year, this feeling was ironically cemented by a pretty bad food poisoning from raw fish that got both me and my partner around midnight of New Year’s Eve, forcing us on a toilet and in bed for the whole duration of the first week of the new year.

For how bad it made us feel, I was relieved I had a plausible excuse to not begin anything yet.

While knee on the floor, head in the toilet, I caught myself smiling, somewhat grateful a teaching had reached me, no matter how harsh a form it took: to take my time in bed, to eat less and sleep when I needed.

Metaphorically, this involuntary detox through which we expelled most of 2021 energy out, worked way more for me than acting ready and writing down resolutions would ever have.

I felt quite alone in my solace though.

Here I was, holding this strong sense I knew there was something else we are naturally supposed to do in this time of lower light, lower temperature, lower energy against what society wants us to do. But it took a lot of energy to protect that spark from life as it is, and from anyone who tends to reject this solitude as the enemy, as a flaw. And only needs to “get well soon”. Or worse, “get work done”.

Ever since I turned 40 last December, I promised myself a secret intention: the gift of getting better at practicing wintering.

I set out to feel and understand what in our true nature we are called to activate in this time of transition, instead of ignoring it and forcing better times to come sooner than expected. Or freak out if they don’t.

Alba, “sunrise”, cozying up under a snow blanket.

In her book Wintering, writer Katherine May writes: “Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season. The world takes on sparse beauty and even the pavement sparkles. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.”

I must be honest with myself. The equivalent of returning to the office as if nothing is happening, this tyranny of busyness as usual while a drastic change in season is in full glare, doesn’t work for me anymore. 

I feel the need to deepen my education to an alternative take on things, both in theory and in practice.

As Paul B. Preciado would call it, in his Chronicles of transit, I feel a “tremor” inside, a voice. “The tremor of the frontier”. Not just a vanity, not just a wish, but a necessity to try to build a place outside of me that could sync to a place inside, rather than thinning my energy reserve trying to match the speed of a ticking clock that takes me, without fail, out of sorts.

I feel responsible to at least try.

From my personal journal: change yourself, change your place, do both.

January is an emptier month, one that usually entails a lot of waiting: for clients to respond to pitches, for the sun to come back through the fog, for things to be written anew, for leaves to return on trees.

So with a little bit of money advance, I prepared for a month in which I could push work back. Decided together with our team to not produce any podcast episodes this month. And just waited for winter to do its work.

Here is what I found so far, through one home experiment, a silent retreat and one journey to the deep North.

I realise my own experience of wintering comes from a place of choice, which is always one of privilege. 

But as we all traverse this, I figured I would share some finding and let them carry a prompt to reflect on your own experience and intentions with your own kind of wintering. 

I hope it can help us all build a world that lives comfortably in all transitions that happen in-between leaving and returning, rather than in all places where one single, sterile idea of arrival is forced upon us.

Returning to water: the ice experiment

The other day, I was scouring a word document of letters with a friend, written over the years.

I was trying to locate a journal entry I sent her during the pandemic lockdowns in 2020. It was about an experiment I did at home, observing a huge block of ice melting in my apartment in a rush of warm weather in October.

It was a day I needed something to do, cause the waiting around was particularly heavy. The air ridden with anxiety.

I decided to take on defrosting the freezer. It was so full of ice in all the wrong places, the door won’t keep shut.

I wanted to use that experience as an entry to this newsletter, because I remembered the feeling it gave me and how strongly it keeps applying to the present, two years later, as I am entering a deeper training in the practice of wintering.

I opened the word document. I wrote ICE in the search bar on the top right corner, and started searching.

The algorithm gave me back a bunch of words that were not ICE, but were partly made of it.

“off-ICE”

“artif-ICE”

“serv-ICE”

“vo-ICE”

“pract-ICE”

“cho-ICE”

I hadn’t noticed before now how ICE is such a fundamental component of many essential words.

Our language is so full of it, and yet it goes unnoticed. Have we, productive humans of the western society, forgotten about how to cherish ICE as an essential part of our lives?

We have created and still perpetuate an ill case of the worst kind of amnesia: forgetting what our nature should be this time of the year.

That with ice, comes stillness.

With stillness, retreat.

With retreat, a truce.

The ice taught me there is a gentle awareness in the simple act of observation. And that it can collect its own kind of wealth overtime.

Maybe, just like in my melting ice experiment, all we really need is permission to melt.

Permission to fall in those gaps that “open in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live. […] Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace.” - Katherine May in Wintering.

In awareness and observation, what melts first, is our fears.

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“The ice experiment” - My personal journal entry, October 2020.

13:35 – 13:55 (1:35 PM - 1:55 PM)

“What is wrong with the freezer?” – my girlfriend asks.

“It was full of ice. Not to mention full of metaphors for this moment in time. I now have my personal collection of icebergs”.

I have them, so they can disappear. Not grow.

I am planning on watching them do so.

I also found a blue ocean. I’ll put it under it.

I am going to see what happens every 20 minutes, and archive.

I am waiting for the ice to talk to me. I have five senses. Are they enough?

13:55 – 14:25 (1:55 PM - 2:25 PM)

Epidermis: like our skin, it is consumed by air.

“If ice would be in the city, it would reflect us to ourselves”, Olafur Eliasson said of his own experiment.

I am here observing it disappear. It doesn’t grow. It is in its nature to dissolve.

I am thinking of my own personal global warming. The pieces that are too hot in my life and are burning my ice, the pieces I want to dissolve: writing about work. Talking to my parents when they present to me only the version of myself I have already let go of. Fear. The rigidity of the lack of dreams.

I think this is what makes me feel alive. A series of experiments to understand the meaning of life.

“Too much time in your hands”. They say.

As if that was the worst thing instead of the magnificent one.

We turned availability of time into a shameful tool.

You are not productive. Shame on you.

You are not producing right now. Shame on you.

You will never produce again. Gotcha.

Produce!

Now you are dead.

Just like me.

I can move on faking it, knowing I am not alone in this war. But if I do, I have just created another corpse, instead of another fighter.

If you survive this inner battle, I tell myself, your value will no longer be a secret to you, no longer negotiable, no longer just disappearing like dehydrated ice skin in the face of the elements.

14:25 – 14:45 (2:25 PM - 2:45 PM)

I put my hand on it. I am a woman. It is ice. Our connection, contact, my warmth causes its further death. There are shapes forming in its disappearance that weren’t there before. The air from the window has picked up. It is now faster and has an immediate effect on it. The more the breeze, the more the bubbles. The more the bubbles, the faster it dies.

Does the ice agree with the idea that less work means better work?

14:45 – 15:05 (2:45 PM - 3:05 PM)

I am waiting. A small creek formed. Slowly swallowing portions of the pavement. Fast at first, then slow and then arresting at the end, in the curve of this plastic body. I had to absorb it with paper and pour it back in. The urge to clean up the mess and manipulate the system into order got to me rapidly. Faster than I expected I heard “Don’t make a mess!”.

15:05 – 15:25 (3:05 PM - 03: 25 PM)

I look at this small island of certainty. It is making my day less uncertain. It’s certain it is going to melt. I am certain I will take a photo of it. I am certain the next twenty minutes will pass. It’s certain I can measure it.

We often think of Art as chaos. Could it be that Art gives us a sense of control instead? The ice is not art. The act of witnessing is. They say both Art and Science are explorative of questions, but that their methods are different. I say they both have something in common.

And that is the waiting (and see).

15:25 – 15:50 (3:25 PM - 3:50 PM)

I pulled out a chair from under the table. I turned it around. Now I am sitting on it with my legs open as wide as the chair, so as to contain it. What will it be of that wooden board absorbing it all on the floor? That chopping board turned into a terrain for display, as volatile and fragile now as the ice itself. There are now no more edges to the ice block. They have turned soft and liquid. The ice has not yet returned to the freezer. The meat is still soft. To reform the ice, please do not open it. To melt the ice, please open it.

15:50 – 16:10 (3:50 PM - 4:10 PM)

The water is still. I cannot really see where it comes from but it’s there. Slowly filling it all up. So slowly, my eye cannot perceive it.

16:10 – 16:30 (4:10 PM - 4:30 PM)

I start to remember now the first block of ice, how it was when it first came out. Does nostalgia kick in at the 8th cycle? Are we already this far into the future? That first block was sharp. Pristine. A block of geometrical perfection.

I remember a verse from Christine and the Queens. “A force de lutter je ne suis que geometrie”. [I fought so much, all that’s left of me is geometry].

One part rough, one sleek. It is white, so white. I had to hold it in my hand, and feel it resist my body temperature. It was impossible to put it down. I am happy to be here and witness this transformation. I feel chosen by the ice.

(UNTRACKED TIME) PM

The ice is gone. It has returned to water. 

Prompt # 1: In Winter, in which gaps are you allowing yourself to fall into? How did the ice experiment resonate with you?

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If you feel like, share your answer in the comment section below.

See you tomorrow for part 2: “Returning to silence: a week going inward”.

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