❄️ Wintering: September ❄️ (Erin Jean Warde)

Join us as we begin our journey through Katherine May's book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.

❄️ Wintering: September ❄️

Friends,

I apologize for the delayed return to my newsletters. As much as I have not wanted to talk about this, because it’s kind of gross, let’s just say I literally started 2025 with a stomach flu hitting me hard. Not sure what omen this has put in front of me, but here we are. I had lofty plans for visioning and planning, that were thrown away the second I got sick. I spent a week healing and when I returned to work on January 6th, I already felt behind. So, naturally this newsletter is behind, too.

But I’ve already begun to treasure Katherine May’s Wintering. Let’s start with this incredible definition:

Wintering 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. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some winterings creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the company you worked for has gone bankrupt, or your partner is in love with someone new. However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.

I can think of so many possible winterings listed here that are, in fact, true in my life—past or present. And even if we appear, on the outside, to have everything together, who amongst us hasn’t felt the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence in one way or another?

I’ve found peace recently through trying to acknowledge how the slowness I tend to take on in the winter season (especially now that I live in a place that gets snow, and 4 inches last weekend even) is not so much sloth as it is me, as a creature, being a creature. As much as we might talk about human intelligence, there’s a creaturely reality within each of us, and the more I connect with it, the more I like how it shapes and changes how I understand myself and my movements, both internally and externally.

What important humility might we need to call on in order to release the shame around our slowness, because we acknowledge winter as a time built for slowness, from the ground up—literally. From the gift of the earth up (and below!) winter is a time for a deeper stillness, a more apparent slowness, which is a gift because slowing down helps us see things that never moved as fast as we did, and cultivating a deeper stillness might mean we finally hear the freeing whisper of less that we could never manage to hear because of the roar of more around us.

But somewhere there, in the depths, I found the seed of a will to live, and its tenacity surprised me.

By calling on my creatureliness, and in doing so, giving myself permission to try to move slower and stiller, I find a source of hope. Because hibernation is not about sloth, it’s about preparing for what is to come. The winter lets us lay fallow, because the spring will be a time of activity—life will peek out from soil; we might peek out from our windows, too. Spring will be a season of new life, and the slowness and stillness of winter will help birth it.

I began to get a feel for my winterings: their length and breadth, their heft. I knew that they didn’t last forever. I knew that I had to find the most comfortable way to live through them until spring.

What would it mean for us, in our many winterings (in any season when they arrive), to acknowledge that we will need to get to know them? I think we often look at pain as something that we want to immediately end—extra strength fast action mega effective pills, please—and of course we do. But we don’t always have the power to end the pain; sometimes we face pains with no pill in existence. So then, we can’t just end the pain, we have to live with it (and I say this as someone with chronic illness, too). No, sometimes we just have to get a feel for our pains, for our many winterings. We have to, whether we like it or not, get to know their length, and breadth, and heft.

But, when this feels disempowering, there is power in asking ourselves: How might I live through them until spring?

Maybe this is why I bristle at new years resolutions. Because what do they do, exactly? How are they meant to serve me? How is a commitment that will run stale by February 1st at the latest supposed to care for and shape me?

How am I supposed to meaningfully and hopefully plan for my year when I have a stomach flu?

No, I don’t want new years resolutions—I want seasonal intentions, possibly? I want to know how to live through my wintering until spring. I want to know how my creaturely body would like to live this year. I don’t want to enact judgment and power over myself, I want to invite myself to lay seed on fertile soil.

… in winter, we witness the full glory of nature’s flourishing in lean times. Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

And this—this quote—I offer to us as a word of hope.

What if, for the new year, instead of trying to change yourself, you learned to flourish alongside nature?

What if we acknowledged that we will need to live through lean times?

What if instead of changing ourselves, we tended to ourselves?

What if we let this wintering be our time to prepare, to adapt, to perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis, even from the warmth and cozyness of our homes in snow?

Winter now, and wintering whenever it arrives, is a time for withdrawing from the world—cultivating stillness and slowness—so we can learn to maximize scant resources and carry out brutal acts of efficiency that will serve us in every season.

Because this, my friends, is where the transformation occurs. Not through trying to fix ourselves, but through seeing ourselves as a creature in creation—as one who is wintering, while holding hope.

With love & care,
EJW

CHAOS LAND COMMUNITY

We’ll be journeying through Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times with this community.

If you’d like to receive essay reflections on the text, just stay subscribed!

Every month in the Chaos Land paid community, we will have monthly mini-retreats. You can expect a 2 hour call on a Sunday afternoon, with time for:

• grounding exercises

• reflection prompts & time to journal

• space to check-in & share with community so we can care for you

Our first Chaos Land Mini-Retreat is this Sunday, January 19th, from 3-5PM CST!

If this sounds like something that would support you, and aren’t yet a paid subscriber, join us for only $7/month!

GOOD NEWS & GRATITUDE PODCAST

If you would enjoy audio devotionals and interviews, I host a podcast for United Thank Offering—Good News and Gratitude—and we have lots of new episodes for you to explore! I especially encourage you to do a deep dive through our Advent episodes!

• Meditation: Emmanuel, God With Us

• New Year, New Resurrection

Subscribe via your favorite podcast app (mine is Spotify) to get alerts when new episodes arrive. Don’t forget to like & review the podcast so we can welcome new listeners! <3

GRAB SOBER SPIRITUALITY

You can always grab my book, Sober Spirituality: The Joy of a Mindful Relationship with Alcohol. This book would serve as an amazing support during Dry January or as you discern changing your relationship with alcohol.