Sleep is not a dead space, but a doorway to a different kind of consciousness—one that is reflective and restorative, full of tangential thought and unexpected insights. In winter, we are invited into a particular mode of sleep: not a regimented eight hours, but a slow, ambulatory process in which waking thoughts merge with dreams, and space is mad

We should sometimes be grateful for the solitude of night, of a winter. They save us from displaying our worst selves to the waking world.

It is far from dead. It is in fact the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again.

We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. Instead we are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when

But then, winter is no time to put on a display. I love the separation it brings, the way that people are scarce even during the daylight hours, when you can drink in the dilute light of the low sun, your shadow stretching long at your feet.

winter is a time when death comes closest—when the cold feels as though it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts. We still perceive the presence of those we’ve lost in the silence of those long evenings and in the depths of darkness that they bring. This is the season of ghosts. Their pale forms are invisible in bright sunlight. Win

you apply ice to a joint after an awkward fall. Why not do the same to a life?

What’s the point in migrating to a warmer country for a couple of weeks to push winter away? It’s just delaying the inevitable. I want to winter in the cold, embrace the changes it brings, acclimatise.

That’s what you learn in winter: there is a past, a present, and a future. There is a time after the aftermath.