Sweet chill January — what we learn about grief in a perennial winter
Winter is a season of dissonance, a time to embody the "Warrior" and possess the discipline to show up and be present for our lives.
“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus
Across the entire family — navel, blood, tangerines, Meyer— the citrus season begins in December. Growing up in Southern California on a Peninsula jutting out, parallel to Malibu, my most visceral memories of a winter Sunday were of peeling Cuties, cold from the refrigerator, my fingertips stained from the pith. As I got older, my teeth would hurt from the sweet chill of the fruit.
I didn’t grow up with White Christmases. Instead, I was raised with sunny days by the coast where a sudden snap in the air was a telltale sign that we were past the unseasonably warm autumn. Some years the shift into winter was a subtle suggestion: we paired a scarf with flip flops or hosted Thanksgivings which begged for fish tacos over turkey. Some years the warmth abruptly met days that nipped our faces pink. But as days quickly turned golden and slipped into night, I started to feel the heaviness of the season.
The hibernal solstice marks the beginning of lengthening days and shortening nights, but the shifting of the earth’s axis also marks transformation — winter is a season of dissonance, a time when we must hold onto the hope of change while still grieving what’s been lost from the year.
In Katherine May’s book Wintering she describes this strange time in a person’s consciousness 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 an outsider.” It’s “involuntary, lonely, and deeply painful.”
I was thankful to remain healthy during this quiet season, and I gained sparks of hope every time I saw someone post that they’ve been vaccinated. No arbitrary turning of the page to 2021 would make me instantly renewed. As I held onto the vision of Spring, I had to address this internal blue, which I had to think so many were silently carrying.
In 2020, the holiday spirit wore a modest coat. To be healthy was the ultimate gift, yet there was whole-hearted grief many of us carried as we witnessed the news, political strife, and numbing statistics. COVID-19 cases and death rates made history. One in five people in Los Angeles now has the virus, a shockingly large number that is expected to grow without significant intervention. In a similar vein, winter continues to ravage inside many of us as rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness continue to escalate feverishly.
To weather this winter, I had to trust what it was trying to teach me. (How could I fathom the absence of meaning?) I started reading everything I could about the season — reflections from poets and prophets, the customs of Druids and First Nations, how Saturn and Jupiter’s alignment created the “Christmas Star.”
January teaches us in the Northern Hemisphere that even in the dead of winter we can prepare our spirit to begin again; we can grow our strength, even if we don’t see the fruit begin to flower.
Two years ago, I stayed in Sedona for the first half of November before I took a new job. I decided to go on my first solo trip because I was burnt out from years of working at a startup. Really though, I had a dream that captivated my waking hours: I was sitting by a campfire, surrounded by red rocks, underneath a dazzling night’s sky. I didn’t really know much of the region, but looking back I believe it was a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the de Young Museum earlier that fall that exalted the American Southwest in my imagination. After a lifetime on the East Coast, O’Keeffe believed she finally found her spirit country in the desert. Decades of painting in deep blues and violets culminated into a dramatic shift — she depicted sprawling vistas made up of a revelation of honey, iron, and blue topaz.
As fall dipped into early winter, I thought I was chasing adventure and solitude, but what I learned was that solitude is challenging to bear when you’re not ready to wrestle with emotion. What I really wanted was some kind of distraction, but it wouldn’t be months later until I really processed the things I left unpacked in my heart.
Nightlife in Sedona consisted of tracking constellations with a western mystic I got to know. As it got cold and dark by five o’clock, he echoed what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”
I spent most of my evenings reading or watching old episodes of Barbara Walters interviewing celebrities while soaking in a small tub. I learned that many Native American tribes had different archetypes for the seasons. And for winter, positioned North on the medicine wheel, the archetype was the Warrior.
“Spiritualism is the highest form of political consciousness,” writes Angeles Arrien, Ph.D. in The Four-Fold Way, a book I was reading at the time. She reveals the sacred teachings from indigenous cultures and how it relates to psychology. For me, the spirit of the Warrior took on new meaning — it’s not about brute force, but the power to brave what is necessary and to practice what is imperative—to spot the constellations when our eyes are adjusting to the night.
I was brushing a horse the color of sand when I talked about this book to a woman who took me riding. She asked what brought me to Sedona and I said that I was burnt out and felt aimless. I was devout to the religion of productivity, but it always left me hungry. I wanted to feel connected to something bigger. We talked about goals. “I also need to be more disciplined,” I confessed, thinking that if I just pushed myself harder I would finally be thin, publish a book, “be better,” and never feel doubt.
She offered insight: one understanding of the word “discipline” meant “being a disciple unto oneself.” My throat tightened which always happens when the levees are about to break. I believed achievement resulted in contentment, but what I unknowingly sought then was self-compassion. Giving that to others flowed like a river. For myself, the river met many rocks.
“The principle that guides the Warrior is showing up and choosing to be present,” writes Arrien, a lesson, and commitment I keep close to my chest since my time in Sedona.
For the Warrior, it requires discipline to be honest and reckon with all that shows up in our lives, and for the ones we love. It requires discipline to acknowledge the uncomfortable feelings that arise in our throat. It takes discipline to know when to let something go, to hold space for those suffering, and to honor the same space in yourself.
Two years after my time in the desert, I hardly leave my house and I’m away from the ones I love. But I’m not alone in this; collective winter is palpable — a global pandemic, racial injustice, a season of wildfires turning the sky orange, an attempted coup—how could we do anything but grieve?
Winter is not the time to turn our attention away from the hurt but to brave the headwinds together, to express our love to one another, grapple with heartbreak and decision. To be disciplined is to pace your life so you can reflect and arrive at an answer that is compassionate and true. In winter, we must face the chill in order to feel the sun’s warmth again. In winter, we must show up and be present.
“If we didn’t remember winter in spring, it wouldn’t be as lovely… half of the keyboard of life would be missing. We would be playing life with no flats or sharps, on a piano with no black keys,” writes Adam Gopkin.
On the first day of 2021, back in Southern California, I was playing outside with my baby nephew. As his mother shielded him from getting too close to the pool’s edge, I stepped barefoot across the cold concrete to pluck a ripe Meyer lemon from the tree. I remember this tree as long as I can remember living in this house and I had never seen it so heavy with fruit.
As soon as I picked it, the lemon transformed into a fragrant toy.
In the summertime, my nephew and I established a game he loved when we first went swimming together: I would hand him a lemon and he would toss it. As it plunged to the bottom of the shallow end, he would laugh like a wind chime, and the lemon would quickly break the surface. I was the Prince’s grateful jester, retrieving the lemon each time, paid in giggles.
We never heat the pool in January. So instead of wading by the steps, my nephew tossed the lemon in the water while I dunked my hand into the cold water fast enough to retrieve it, my hand flushed.
“How funny would it be if you fell in,” my sister said. We both laughed since we often narrate each other’s lives as if it were a scene from a movie. Eventually, my nephew threw the lemon past my reach so I used a noodle to guide it back to the edge. “MacGruber!” my sister sang.
We laughed in the cold, hopeful, knowing this perennial winter, casting our lives in bronze, was not over just yet. I took this moment with my sister, her son, the cold pool, and a Meyer lemon as joy, the sweet chill of citrus season, as we rang in the first of January.