How We Survive Winter
The solstice arrives in the depths of the pandemic. But the season of darkness also offers ancient lessons of hope and renewal.
For generations, as the days darkened and the blizzards came, the Anishinaabe people warned of the Windigo.
He is the monster of winter, dripping with ice and white with snow, and he is starving, said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, as she remembered the story of her ancestors. He is a human turned cannibal. His hunger is never satiated, and it endangers everyone around him. He thinks only of himself.
In winter, a time of scarcity, she went on, he is a cautionary tale to remember the good of the community, beyond the self. Winter is known as the hungry time, the dangerous time, she said, and people counted their age not by years but by how many winters they have survived — that man has 70 winters, this woman has 16. They wintered in small family groups, not villages, to spread out the demand on the land.
This winter, as the coronavirus pandemic consumes the country, it is as though we are reliving the unbuffered winters of our ancestors, she said.
“In wintertime, all life is on that knife edge between life and death,” said Dr. Kimmerer, the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “Winter is a teacher of vulnerability.”
This year a raw and unbridled winter has descended on America. Its darkness is literal, with the coming of the solstice on Monday, and it is metaphorical, with the catastrophic toll of Covid-19, as each day the number of Americans dead grows steadily. Across the country, the arrival of winter has filled people with fear and dread for what is to come.
These next few months could be the most difficult in the country’s entire public health history, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, warned recently. More than 300,000 Americans have died from Covid-19, and by February another 150,000 could die, he said. Intensive care units across the country are running critically short of beds. Families are separated over the holidays. Unemployment benefits for as many as 13 million people are set to expire at the end of the year.
The undeniable hardship of this winter is a reminder that for much of human history, particularly in colder climates, winter was a season simply to be survived. Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of what it means to be human.
“I have spent some long, scary nights waiting for the sun to come up. There have also been some long, barren seasons when I feared the sap would never rise again,” Barbara Brown Taylor, an author and Episcopal priest, reflected. “The hardest thing is to keep trusting the cycle, to keep trusting that the balance will shift again even when I can’t imagine how. So far it has.”
For millenniums, during these months of darkness, humans have turned to rituals and stories to remind one another of hope and deeper truths.
All over the world, celebrations of light dot the winter darkness like stars. Hindus, Jains and Sikhs celebrate Diwali, a five-day festival of light’s victory over darkness. December in the Christian calendar marks the season of Advent, or waiting for salvation in the birth of Jesus. Since ancient times humans have created rituals to imitate a desired outcome. One of the oldest such practices is the act of lighting fire to call back the sun.
Even now, as winter arrives in the Northern Hemisphere, the devastation is interwoven with a promise that darkness may not last forever: The day the death toll in the United States passed 300,000 was also the day the country began inoculating health care workers from the virus.
“The darkness of the days are real for me, and the darkness of the pandemic is very real to me,” said Michael T. Osterholm, a member of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s coronavirus task force and the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
“We have to keep our eye on the end of the tunnel, knowing that there is light there,” Dr. Osterholm said. “The days of the pandemic are going to get brighter, as are the days of our world. It is ironic they both hope to get brighter around the same time.”
Stories of surviving darkness are among the most enduring humans have, connecting us across culture and time.
The Iranian tradition of Yalda began some 2,500 years ago, rooted in the Zoroastrian practices of ancient Persia. On the winter solstice families gather for a feast and surround themselves with candles, eat pomegranates and nuts, and recite poetry, often by the Persian master Hafez, said Omid Safi, professor of Iranian studies at Duke University who celebrates the night with his family.
“It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before,” he said. “It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”
Medieval Persian writings suggested that if one could not afford a feast, it is enough to bring a flower, he said.
“Look for the smallest bit of beauty around you,” Dr. Safi explained. “That very much resonates today, at a time where it seems like the mega-systems are all broken or falling apart, to return your gaze to the small.”
In ancient Israel, the hot and dry summer was a more dangerous time than the winter, which brought much needed rain, said Benjamin D. Sommer, professor of Bible and ancient Semitic languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Yet around the solstice, ancient Jewish and Canaanite peoples most likely celebrated light rituals common across the Northern Hemisphere, he said.
Hanukkah, the eight-day Jewish festival of lights, likely emerged from that general practice and the commemoration of the Maccabean revolt of the second century B.C., which re-established Jewish worship at the Temple in Jerusalem, he said, with rabbis later stressing spiritual themes of light and darkness. In later Jewish mystical literature, writers explored the idea that the primeval light of creation returns in Hanukkah celebration.
“It is a holiday that says, from a little bit of light in the midst of great darkness we are confident we can get light and more light and more light, which is what is happening with the menorah over eight days,” Dr. Sommer said.
In the Chinese conception of time, the winter solstice is the apex of yin energy and the destructive forces of fall and winter, said Jonathan Pettit, assistant professor of Chinese religions at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
On the solstice in early medieval China, Daoist priests would intercede to the gods, who gathered in the wintry part of the heavens to judge people’s deeds, he said.
“The winter solstice marks the point in time where the generative and creative powers of our universe start to return and grow again,” he said. “It is the other end of a dyadic power of yin and yang that balance and rebalance each other every cycle through the seasons.”
The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter.
“The stars are especially beautiful in the wintertime,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, the pope’s official astronomical institute, which dates back to the Renaissance as part of the scientific tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. “Unfortunately the clearest nights are also the coldest nights, because the clouds act as a blanket to keep the warmth in.”
Some people mistakenly think that it is coldest in winter because Earth is farthest from the sun, but Earth’s orbit actually means it is closest to the sun in January, he went on. Artificial light has interrupted humanity’s experience of true darkness, making us more uncomfortable, and robbing us of the night sky, he said.
“It is an interesting metaphysical as well as astronomical truth, that it is only when you have good darkness that you can see the faint lights, whether it is faint stars, or the little points of light, the thousand points of light that bring us hope even in darkness,” Brother Consolmagno said.
In a year that stripped life to bare fundamentals, the natural world has become our shared story. Seasons have offered the rare reminder that the world moves on even as our sense of time has blurred. Spring blossoms offered hope amid the first wave of Covid-19 deaths. The heat of summer brought unrest and social awakening. Fall’s colors brightened the shortening days and political turmoil.
Now winter is here, and in colder climates, signs of life can be hard to find. The sun disappears, trees lose their leaves, animals hibernate. It reveals humans as creatures who need food and shelter and community, and who are mortal.
Plants have several survival strategies, like going underground, or packing all they need to live into small buds or seeds, but animals are especially exposed, Dr. Kimmerer, the plant ecologist, said.
“If we die, we die. We don’t have buds and seeds,” she said. “There are beautiful metaphorical parallels, what can go on if we do die — to me I think about stories at that point. Stories and memory and spirit can go on.”
“The most important thing is to hold that tiny spark of life, if it is in a bud, in a seed, that is our work, to hold on to life, so when spring comes back, there can be growth. If you fail at that, spring doesn’t matter,” she said. “That seems like a Covid teaching to me.”
On her farm in rural northeast Georgia, Ms. Taylor, the author and Episcopal priest, stacked wood for a solstice bonfire. Winter is a time to cover the compost heap so worms can get busy turning leftovers into soil, she said, and to plant a ground cover crop like crimson clover to nourish the garden while it rests. The farm taught the repeating cycle of light and dark, she said.
“I’ve stopped trying to handle the darkness. I let the darkness handle me instead,” she said. “Most of the time all it wants to do is hold me for a while — slow me down, keep me from running, cover me up long enough to remember that being in the dark doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. It means I’m alive, and this is part of the deal.”
Humans all over the Northern Hemisphere will share nature’s winter ritual of darkness on Monday, whether they acknowledge the winter solstice or not.
In the lower 48 states, this year’s longest night will last 15 hours and 50 minutes in Angle Inlet, Minn., according to the U.S. Naval Observatory.
In New York City it is 14 hours and 45 minutes, and in Miami 13 hours and 28 minutes.
In Ka Lae, Hawaii, the southernmost point in the country, it will last exactly 13 hours.
The longest night of all is hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, at the northernmost tip of the country. In Utqiagvik, Alaska, the sun set in November, buried beneath the horizon, not to rise for 65 nights. And even here, one of the remotest places on earth, the coronavirus is spreading.
Roy Nageak Sr.’s family has lived in the region for hundreds of years. Winter darkness, he said, is an accepted part of life. Every year, in winter, “families would get together and tell these stories of who we are, where we came from,” and they would share “the wisdom and knowledge they have gathered for hundreds and thousands of years in the darkness of the winter.”
Mr. Nageak remembered a story his mother would tell, about one winter a century ago, in 1918. She was a small child, maybe 3 or 5, living to the east in what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, when word came that people were dying of a strange flu.
So the families moved inland, up into the mountains. His uncle told of a large lake they found, where they could get any fish they wanted. There they stayed, through the winter, until they heard that people were not dying anymore.
“People say it is a cold snowy wasteland,” he said. “But for us it is a good place to live.”
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