A Sharp Wintering

I thought I might skip writing about winter for this newsletter; it just seemed a bit obvious. We all get it: it’s cold (or colder), it’s rainy sometimes, it’s darker. There are holidays. I thought we all understood the gist, that I didn’t need to make a point of it. But then the frosts started and daylight savings ended and I remembered, as I do every year, that winter is actually a big deal, even in California. Our lives become remarkably, structurally different. We sleep differently, we eat differently. We have to change our habits; the walks or errands or chores we got used to doing after work now must happen in the dark or not at all. It’s all very dramatic, even if it happens predictably and every single year. 

So I found, when I sat down to write, that I couldn’t help but write about winter. It wasn’t so much on my mind as in my body, an inward curling, a hunkering. I’m a hunkerer by nature, but you may not be. Some of us love nothing more than to curl up in warm, softly lit rooms; others have no time for curling up. Some of our work slows down; for others it only increases around the frenzy of the winter holidays. Some of us thrive in the dark; some of us have seasonal depression and have to fight for every scrap of joy we want to feel between November and March. We all know, by now, to be gentle with each other this time of year. There may be opportunities to feel festive and restful, but many are worn completely down by the end of the year, were worn down even before the pandemic and now are utterly gutted. We are no longer in the 90’s; none of us are living in a Hallmark movie nor expect to. Still, there’s an automatic surveying that starts to happen around winter solstice, reminders everywhere to reflect back on our year, shed old skins, set new intentions. Even if we would desperately prefer not to, who of us escapes the last few weeks of the Gregorian calendar without some moment of measuring: what we’ve come through in the last twelve months, where we’ve gotten to, what we’ve lost. 

Whether we like it or not, winter comes for us to remind us to take a look at where we are, who we are with, what we are doing. And however much the holiday spirit asks us to look only at what we are grateful for⸺I have a literal farm now, how could I not?⸺we cannot help but be reminded of the painful parts too. It’s what makes this time of year so tender, why we must be tender with each other. It’s why we bake each other cookies and loaves of bread, isn’t it, in recognition of the care we all need from each other? “However it arrives,” writes Katherine May in her book Wintering, “wintering is usually involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful. Yet it’s also inevitable. We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.” She’s writing, of course, not only about physical wintering but emotional wintering as well, the winters we enter into at different points in our lives when we face loss or loneliness. She describes wintering as “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 outsider,” a period none of us escapes even if we do actually live in a Hallmark movie. “Everyone winters at one time or another;” writes May, “some winter over and over again.”

A loaf of homemade sourdough from one of our CSA members, which almost made me cry.

Have any of us come out of the last few years without having had some kind of wintering? Whatever kind of hope we may have placed on new years and new beginnings have surely been tamped if not crushed in the relentless heartache of the past two, four, six years. My only living grandparent died three months before the 2016 election, and I mark that August as the beginning of relentless change in my own life, an unmooring from my sense of self and my place inside this wild world of ours. The change was slow and subtle and then all at once, painful and confusing and absolutely necessary. Remember, May reminds us: “Some winters happen in the sun.” 

Perhaps you, too, have been set in strange new directions these past few years. Perhaps this year you moved to a new town just as the Delta variant was picking up. Perhaps you have lost loved ones to Covid or to any of the other myriad ways there are to die. Perhaps you lost your job. Perhaps you have the spent the last year tirelessly organizing against the white supremacy nestled comfortably in every one of our institutions and deep within each of our sick hearts and here at the end of 2021 you are exhausted and struggling to maintain hope that it can be uprooted. Perhaps you have lost friends in the battles over masks and vaccination. Perhaps you had a baby this year and have been desperate for the help and community the pandemic has made so painstakingly difficult. Perhaps you were planning on gathering, finally, with family or friends you don’t often see, and then Omicron came in like a motherfucker and now your holidays are going to look very different. Or perhaps and no less painfully, nothing at all has changed for you, in which case, here at the end of 2021, I invite you to pause and consider: what might you wish to change? As Octavia Butler wrote, “God is change,” the only thing we can be sure of. It may be possible that the only changes that have cycled through your life this year are completely and blessedly welcome, but not without work, without some sweat and reckoning and shedding of skin that you were not quite sure you were ready to lose. Katherine May writes:

The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive. Dormice laying on fat to hibernate, swallows navigating to South Africa, trees blazing out the final weeks of autumn. It is all very well to survive the abundant months of the spring and summer, but 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, maximizing 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 it’s crucible.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It’s a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.

Doing those deeply unfashionable things—slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting—is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you’ll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you’ll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don’t, then that skin will harden around you.

No matter how much we love darkness (and I do love it a lot), it’s always a gentle reminder of death, of all kinds of endings. Growing up, my witchy mother always insisted that the calendar was all wrong, that the winter solstice should mark the middle of winter, not the beginning. And it has often felt strange, how we start our new years in the darkest part of the year, instead of waiting for spring with its more intuitive symbols of beginning. But the longer I farm the more right I feel about the strange calendar year we all live by. Winter solstice is the end of the year, our closing bell, the turning off of the light. From it we enter this sweet liminal space before the new year officially begins, and every year I feel grateful for these few in-between weeks to gather, if only my thoughts. Even when I can’t stop working or go out of town, as I certainly can’t this year, it still feels right to me that we are allowed to take a beat, after this darkest night of the year, before we start changing our calendars and looking down the long open line of months strung out before us, just waiting to be filled with activity and production and the endless churning of the capitalist machine we all live in. But first, a breath.

But here it is: my winter. It’s an open invitation to transition into a more sustainable life and to wrest back control over the chaos I’ve created. It’s a moment when I have to step into solitude and contemplation...I can feel the downturn coming; I know that baking and soup-making can’t sustain me forever. It will get worse than this: darker, leaner, lonelier. I want to lay down a bed of straw beneath me to cushion the blow when it comes. I want to make everything ready. (May)

I’ve been working mostly outside off and on for about ten years. Every winter there is a scurry to figure out new rhythms to get things done before dark and a desperate hunt for better rain gear. For two of those years I lived in Montana during the school year and marveled at everyone working construction and delivering pizzas and farming in blizzards and freezing temperatures. I became very invested in the design and materials of gloves. Even still, winter has always felt like a glorious relief after the mania of summer. Katherine May describes summer, at its worst, as “one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away,” and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to recognizing that description. The meaning, after all, comes in winter. “Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience,” May writes, “and wisdom resides in those who have wintered.” I’ve been reading her book to prepare and understand my own winter, this season I’ve chosen to focus so much energy on. I wanted to start a winter farm because I love winter and winter vegetables, and because I hate to stop eating fresh, local and diverse produce for a big chunk of every year. But it is admittedly a tricky task, to have the rhythm of my work speed up right as my body wants it to slow down. I can’t quite do without the withdrawal of winter, the moment of self-reflection and gathering, but I need to do it while in the peak of harvesting and distribution. I need to pause without pausing, as we all do, to find enough space within each day or hour or moment to get everything done that needs to be done while sustaining a sense of perspective, of being both in each task and slightly outside, putting it all into context, finding the meaning in the thing I’m already doing.

Though it might be ill-advised for a winter farmer, I refuse to let my winter become just another version of summer (and summer is still summer even on a winter farm. The seasons have a way of holding their shape). I am determined to farm in a way that lets the meaning in. I am trying to do this gracefully, without guilt or competition or overburdening my sister. You all have figured out by now that Anna works the hardest here. She’s up the earliest, her focus consistent and dedicated. She is always making long lists of tasks and then working through them, always drawing my attention back to the task at hand. But she pushes herself past her own limit sometimes, and I know that she will need to learn to rest well and deeply if she wants to avoid the kind of burnout and exhaustion that it is much harder to come back from. “An occasional sharp wintering would do us good,” Katherine May advises, and it’s unavoidably true. Who would I be now without my winterings, the soft nudging ones and the long brutal ones? They have taught me my boundaries, what I will and will not give to my work and to my community and the people I love. I will give a lot, but I will not give everything. My winters have shown me when I’m on the right track and when I have strayed off course. They have taught me to love limits, and maybe that is also why I picked this season, for though we are a winter farm, there still remains only a finite amount we can do in these shorter days, only so much that we can control. In summer we water the soil to our ideal moisture levels and open and close greenhouses all day to monitor temperature. In winter, the soil is mostly unworkable with the tractor; the hours of daylight we have will only let plants grow at a limited rate, and the temperatures can only germinate so much seed. We bring in backup, of course, with high tunnels and heat mats, but they only go so far. We must work within limits during these months, and rely heavily on the work we’ve already done. It has to have been enough. We can’t grow more winter squash or corn; we don’t have time to get more overwintering brassicas established. We have to trust our past selves. Our days will be spent harvesting, occasionally seeding in the hoop house, weeding what we can in the wet conditions. We will look at longer term projects, try to inject more order into our recordkeeping and crop-planning systems. We try our very best to build a more permanent greenhouse. We will spend a good amount of time standing and staring at various parts of this property. We will watch the weather forecast and guess about flooding. But right now, on the darkest day of the year, we are in that liminal space between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. We won’t start any more seeds until January; the plants will be ready at the same time if we start them now or in a month. We are in a moment of pause, if only a moment. Tomorrow, the light will begin to come back. Tomorrow, we move one step further on the machine that pulls us along to the next event and the next, and we don’t know what it will look like or if 2022 deserves our hopes or intentions or dreamy goals. We will try our best, though maybe not our absolute best. We can keep a little back, in reserve, just for ourselves. Who knows when we will need it, or who will need it from us. Maybe it will be all we have to make meaning with. 

If you are a member of our CSA, you may have made a wreath this week, arranging the flowers that Anna lovingly dried all season into a circle to decorate your home with beauty and color for several months. Not to betray my own witchy leanings, but today I listened to a podcast about the winter solstice called Between the Worlds, in which I learned that wreaths symbolize the wheel of the year, and that hanging a wreath on your door is the most basic and vital ritual you can perform for the solstice. Again I was overwhelmed with the rightness of these rituals⸺what we just think of as crafts, or calendars, or cookies⸺that we have inherited from our various ancestors and cultures, so that we have not had to learn anew how live in this world and these seasons. I don’t think Anna was thinking about the wheel of time when she suggested making wreaths just before winter solstice, but there we were just the same, weaving willow into hoops, performing the ritual we have inherited to help us understand winter. “Their evergreen boughs remind us that life doesn’t end, that life and death are in fact one…With a wreath on your door, every time you enter, every time you leave, you’ll be reminded of how you are moving through time and space, orbiting around the sun, honoring that which is being born and that which is falling away.” It’s almost enough to make me feel like Christmas decorations are, in fact, deeply meaningful, that the cheesy limping offers we make to the seasons are in their own way holy. It’s what we have. 

A wreath hanging on the door of one of our CSA member’s homes

May, Katherine. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. Riverhead Books: New York 2020.