“I live in the low parts now, most days a little hazy with fever and waiting for the water to stop shivering out of the body.  Funny thing about grief, its hold is so bright and determined like a flame, like something almost worth living for.” Ada Limon, “Fire”

Winter has always been my least favorite season.  Dislike of being cold is a big reason I moved to Palm Springs from Boston.  Now that I’ve lived in the desert through more seasons, I still find winter — even here — relatively uncomfortable.  But I recognize winter is part of life, vital for respite and replenishment.

In her book “Wintering,” Katherine May notes that just as winter is a natural season, cyclical and recurring, so too can it be a state of mind.  “Winter” can be a metaphor for those phases in our life when we feel frozen out or unable to make the next step, and that that can come at any time, in any season.  Grief, loneliness, depression… all these feelings can mean great suffering.  

I’ve always tried to avoid those winter feelings.  Poet Ada Limon’s sentiment quoted above, of living for grief, seemed inconceivable.  My faith and cultural traditions somehow taught me such “unpleasant” winter feelings were somehow wrong; to be hidden and repressed.  Of course this made the suffering even harder, and lonely.  For me, compartmentalizing didn’t work, and instead often erupted in unhealthy ways.  In the second half of my life, I’ve learned that acknowledging and exploring my winter feelings, sometimes with the help of a friend, spiritual director or psychotherapist, can help me both heal the pain, and become more whole.

Pastoral counselor and author Paul Deal (“Bringing Spirituality and Religion into Counseling”) uses a Jungian framework to suggest that addressing and integrating what makes us suffer — our shadow selves — is the work of a lifetime.  Deal argues that Jesus’ message was that bringing forth what is within us can save us: that God is working in and through all of our human messiness, often especially through our suffering.  Our leaning into that messiness – those winter feelings – can lead to wholeness, or what some Christians call salvation.Katherine May notes that in the pagan year, there is a ceremony or ritual being marked every six weeks across the year, giving hope to those who are suffering because one is never far from the next moment when one can join with others to celebrate, and mark one’s progression.  Living in community can provide support, meaning and joy, through all seasons, physical and metaphorical, including winter.  

Sam Thayer, Member of Desert Interfaith Council and Contributor to “Words of Faith”