vanya
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vanya
In At Day's Close, the historian A. Roger Ekirch argues that, before the industrial revolution, it was normal to divide the night into two periods of sleep: the 'first’, or 'dead', sleep, lasting from the evening until the early hours of the morning; and the 'second', or morning', sleep, which took the slumberer safely to daybreak. In between,
... See moreSome people thrive on a little sleep deprivation, but I do not. I now know that I can achieve far more after nine hours than I can in the spare time afforded by a short night. Sleeping is my sanity, my luxury, my addiction. …
And winter sleeps are the best. I like my duvet thick and my bedroom cold, so that I have a chill to snuggle against. Unlike
... See moreI don't mind staying in at all. I realise that, for plenty of people, it feels like a brutal restriction of their freedom, but it suits me down to the ground.
Winter is a quiet house in lamplight, stepping into the garden to see bright stars on a clear night, the roar of the wood-burning stove, and the accompanying smell of charred wood. It is
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The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and
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As we so often find in ancient folklore, the Cailleach offers us a cyclical metaphor for life, one in which the energies of spring can arrive again and again, nurtured by the deep retreat of winter. We are no longer accustomed to thinking in this way. We are instead in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear; a long march from birth to death
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‘The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.’
Wintering, Katherine May, p. 77
You wait it out. And once things are better, you forget the quality of 'it' altogether. That part of you gets cast aside, happily forgotten. Life begins to happen again, and that makes for more compelling memories.
Wintering, Katherine May, p. 74
Halloween is no longer a time for remembrance, but it still reveals our need to enter liminal spaces: those moments when we're standing on the breach of fear and delight, and those times when we wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while. But most of all, it hints at the winter to come, opening the door to the dark
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Ghosts may be a part of the terror of Hallow-een, but our love of ghost stories betrays a far more fragile desire: that we do not fade so easily from this life. We spend a lot of time talking about leaving a legacy in this world, grand or small, financial or rep-utational, so that we won't be forgotten. But ghost stories show us a different
... See morenature and