Wintering: The power of rest and retreat in difficult times

I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise.

I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in: still, rhythmic work with the hands, the kind of light concentration that allows you to dream, and the sense of a kindness done in the process.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season when 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.

‘The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.’

In the changing room later, I experience a different kind of warmth: the nakedness of a dozen women, all unashamed. These aren’t the posing bodies you find on the beach, dieted beyond all joy to be bikini-ready, and tanned as an act of disguise. These are northern bodies, slack-bottomed and dimpling, with unruly pubic hair and the scars of hysterec

I realise, suddenly, how this season of illness has rearranged my mind into a library of paranoia.

I was always aware that I was flying in the face of polite convention in doing this, and that the times when we fall out of everyday life remain taboo. We’re not raised to recognise wintering, or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from view lest we shock the world too great

anyway. At moments like this, sleep feels like falling; you sink into luxurious blackness only to jolt awake again, staring around at the darkness as if you might divine something in the grainy night. The only things I could find were my own fears: the unbearable fact of his suffering, and the terror of being left to survive without him.

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into Somewhere Else.