Stuck in Winter

Life

25 Feb

By Seán Mullan

(From the January - March 2020 issue of VOX)

“The winter is always dangerous to you.” The line is from a letter the artist Paul Gauguin penned to his friend Vincent Van Gogh. Written in spring the warning was to prove of no value to Vincent who never got to see another winter. But the caution could still be worth heeding for many who, like Van Gogh, find winter the most difficult time of year.

Reflecting on my own experience, I have come up with the word “stuck.” I’m stuck because I often end the working day in winter considering once more the possibility of relocating to somewhere in Italy, preferably somewhere down in the toe or heel, where it might be possible to get through January without hot whiskey, murky mucous and a rasping bark that scares older ladies, including the one I’m married to.

“I can spend days wondering if the sun is ever again going to put in an appearance.”

I’m stuck because I can spend days wondering if the sun is ever again going to put in an appearance and trying desperately to recall the last time I saw it. And I’m stuck because no matter how often I rebuke myself and tell me to get my act together, I simply don’t do as much or as well as I would like to in winter.

I’ve been given a lot of sage advice over the years for coping with mid-winter “stuckness.” Get outside more. Exercise. Watch your alcohol intake – even if it is diluted with boiling water, cloves and lemon and reclassified as “medicine.” Fly south for a while - like the birds. And there is a lot of wisdom in such advice. But there’s also wisdom in accepting that winter is the season of “stuckness” and will ever be so, at least in Ireland. So, I like Garrison Keillor’s claim that winter is an annual serious attempt by nature to kill us. That’s a good starting point.

Perhaps part of my struggle has been a failure to respect winter and acknowledge its importance in the cycle of the year. Winter is a time of decay, rotting and death. It is nature’s season of nothing happening before life eventually restarts. Yet in our technology-ruled age with darkness and cold no longer in charge, we try to keep on living and working as if winter were the same as every other time of year.

We work the same number of hours a day, expect the same level of productiveness and, very often, beat ourselves up when we don’t achieve it. It’s ironic that it’s in summer when the rest of nature is busy producing, when our own energy levels are high and we are capable of doing more, that we work less, take long holidays and close down places of learning.

There was some wisdom in the fourth century Christian leaders who decided that the mid-winter solstice was the best time to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Since they hadn’t a clue what time of year Jesus was born, they could pick their time and they picked well. And the notion of marking the shortest day and the “turn” of the year has even older roots in Ireland. The extraordinary passage graves at Newgrange show that the mid-winter pivot was an important day to people who lived millennia before Jesus.

We haven’t done well in preserving that ancient tradition of marking mid-winter, acknowledging darkness but celebrating light. We have gone from celebrating light on a dark day and the birth of Jesus as the light of the world to weeks of compulsory cheerfulness, competitive giving and inordinate consumption. For those unable or unwilling to submit it can be a very difficult time. Father Peter McVerry recently declared that he hates Christmas for this reason, because it isolates homeless people even more than usual.

What’s so bad about being stuck in winter for a while? What’s wrong with producing less, resting more and acknowledging the season we are in? Patrick Kavanagh’s poem “Advent” celebrates the scarcity of the advent season, the beginning of winter. He celebrates not scarcity itself but scarcity’s capacity to bring back to us again

...the newness that was in every stale thing when we looked at it as children.

Maybe Hibernia, the “land of winter” as the Romans called it, could become the “land that does winter well.” Perhaps we could learn to accept the “stuckness” of it all, reject enforced cheerfulness and acknowledge the darkness of the days. If we do, then we might perceive in the darkness the promise of light and life for the future. Again the poet puts it best:

We have thrown into the dustbin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.