The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.

Here is another truth about wintering: you’ll find wisdom in your winter, and once it’s over, it’s your responsibility to pass it on.

There is not enough night left for us.

But their lives are also full of stark efficiencies. In the middle of winter, the area around my favourite beehive is littered with the corpses of the bees that were no longer useful—the most expendable, who were sent on the dangerous mission of foraging; the male drones who were ejected from the hive at the end of their useful lives.

By embracing winter, rather than trying to push it away, we have both found a way to keep going.

I used to think that these were wasted days, but I now realise that’s the point.

While we may no longer see depression as a failure, we expect you to spin it into something meaningful pretty quick.

In “Bee Wise,” for example, the socialist author Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined an idealised society founded by women, where domestic labour was shared on a mass scale and the careful industry of women produced superior leather, cotton, and fruit.

Beivve, their sun goddess, travels across the sky each day in a ring of reindeer antlers, casting fertility back down to earth.