Blanket of Winter
The Understory: Issue Twenty
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Sometimes, as happened with Issue Ten during the west coast wildfires, my publishing schedule overlaps with current events so as to seem both prophetic and editorial. Because The Understory covers topics of our evolving human condition in an era of a rapidly changing climate, I have come to accept that these timely occurrences are not coincidental, but rather should be expected. By publishing this issue when much of the United States is still struggling under frigid temperatures not seen in decades, I recognize it could be perceived as insensitive to the suffering of many who find themselves without life’s basics such as heat and clean water. This is a time to both help those who are suffering and to galvanize political will to prevent such unnecessary suffering in the future. As the magnitude and frequency of climate disasters will undoubtedly increase, I hope to inspire mutual aid and action.
I grew up in Memphis and went to graduate school in Austin. I have family and very close friends scattered across the American southeast and Texas—one of whom described this week to me as a literal disaster. What was in one moment a celebration of novelty and beauty as snow blanketed 73% of the United States, quickly descended into a dangerous reality for the unhoused, while also threatening the health and well-being of millions who have homes as they became helpless and stranded due to collapsed power grids. I will leave it to journalists to probe the details. Fellow Substack writer Eric Holthaus just published an excellent article in The Phoenix covering why “The Texas blackout is an environmental justice disaster,” and The Guardian has been voraciously publishing stories about the many sides to the blackout story. As Houstonian Bryan Washington writes in The New Yorker article, “Texans in the Midst of Another Avoidable Catastrophe”,
“The exacerbation of one emergency doesn’t eliminate the likelihood of another—and we can be sure that this storm, like every other once-in-a-generation weather event that Houstonians have experienced in the past few years, will not be the last. Like all our other travails, it will require an expansion of the imagination, and our leaders’ inability to rise to the task won’t eliminate the necessity of doing so.”
Some leaders resist blame for events that are considered anomalous, suggesting that their role is to prepare their communities for “normal times.” While many of our so-called leaders seem more interested in finger-pointing their way out of crises than actual leadership, there will be others who emerge from such moments transformed; who have been able to look at the changed reality of our world and understand our exposed vulnerabilities by how we inhabit the earth.
The Understory seeks to be a publication of hope in the vein that Rebecca Solnit identified as “broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.” Issue Twenty sets out to build a discourse around our relationship to Winter, as we relearn what it means to live with rather than apart from the seasons. To look deeply at our modern, industrial context. To understand how we have come to seemingly insulate ourselves from the vulnerabilities of Winter by disconnecting from our relationships to the living world that surrounds us beyond our built structures.
The very self-reliance that enables us to live largely apart from Winter exposes us to the season’s greatest might when it is able to seep through our structural cracks. This issue does not celebrate the suffering and destruction around us, but rather seeks to honour it and to create the space to imagine a different way of being. Thomas Berry calls this the “great work” of our time—to move from being a disruptive force on this earth to a benign presence.
Preserving Light in Darkness
For millennia, humans have dramatically altered their lifestyles and behaviours with the changing of the seasons. Winter was a time to survive, not to thrive. In some Indigenous cultures, people count their age not in years but rather by how many Winters they survived. Historically humans prepared for Winter, much like other species, recognizing the need for an extended period of dormancy to survive the unfavourable conditions. As Katherine May beautifully describes in her book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Winter is a time of transformation for all the living:
“Plants and animals don't fight winter; they don't pretend it's not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight...Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible."
This process of leaf senescence helps plants to survive Winter, with preparations beginning long before the arrival of frigid temperatures. Marc Estiarte and Josep Peñuelas describe the first change as the cessation of growth in the middle of the active season, followed by bud set to protect meristems with bud scales alongside biochemical changes at the cellular level.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer conveys to Elizabeth Dias in “How We Survive Winter,” while humans can prepare ourselves for Winter, we don’t have buds and seeds to protect our corporeal mortality:
“If we die, we die...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.”
While we tend to think of material or biochemical preparations for wintering, Kimmerer reminds us that the spark of life also comes through our communal ways of gathering. Dias shares examples of the myriad cultures around the world that have ceremonies and rituals for celebrating light in a time of increasing darkness. Diwali celebrates the victory of light over darkness for Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs. Chanukah is the Jewish celebration of light in dark times. Approximately 2,500 years ago in ancient Persia, the solstice tradition of Yalda began in which fire is lit with candles to call back the sun while eating pomegranate and nuts alongside poetry recitation. As explained by professor Omid Safi: “It is a beautiful way of assuring you that you have lived through long nights before. It is precisely at the point that the night is longest and darkest that you’ve actually turned a corner.”
Winter is the time when stories flourish. For oral cultures, Winter marked the season of transferring knowledge when entire communities would gather together to share their stories. It is the oral traditions that keep not only the stories alive, but also transfer lessons integral to survive. At a time when living is hardest, Sherri Mitchell shares in Sacred Instructions that the practice of storytelling maintains our connection to life.
“Our stories are multilayered, containing different lessons for all age groups and development levels. This allows every individual to grow and evolve with the living stories, and continue to find meaning in them.”
These stories live on far beyond the lives of any individual. “Stories and memory and spirit can go on,” adds Kimmerer, even if our bodies do not survive Winter.
The Interior of Our Winters
For most of us who live in the world of industrial time, it is only when Winter is forced upon us by the failure of our machines that we recognize its presence and become vulnerable to its conditions. In The Great Work, Thomas Berry describes a world that bears little resemblance to ancestral lives integrated with the land or the storytelling gatherings of traditional oral cultures. While Indigenous people live in a universe of cosmological order, those of us in industrial societies have eschewed the universe for the human-constructed world:
“We in North America live in a political world, a nation, a business world, an economic order, a cultural tradition, a Disney dreamland. We live in cities, in a world of concrete and steel, of wheels and wires, a world of unending work. We seldom see the stars at night or the planets or the moon. Even in the day we do not experience the sun in any immediate or meaningful manner. Summer and Winter are the same inside the mall. Ours is a world of highways, parking lots, shopping centers. We read books written with a strangely contrived human alphabet. We no longer read the Book of Nature...We no longer read the book of the universe. We have extensive contact with the natural world through photographs and television presentations. But as Saint Augustine remarked long ago, a picture of food does not nourish us. Our world of human meaning is no longer coordinated with the meaning of our surroundings. We have disengaged from that profound interaction with our environment that is inherent in our nature.”
What Berry so vividly portrays is that while in many ways we have insulated ourselves from Winter’s effects of loss, grief, and death that for much of human history accompanied it, in the process we have created a new kind of loss. Our cultural loss as an industrial society is that we no longer gain meaning from natural surroundings. It is the world of our own making that surrounds us now, and it is nearly impossible to see beyond it both literally and metaphorically. Our language is a written culture rather than an oral one. Our book is read at the tempo of machine time rather than at the pace of our natural surroundings.
Berry writes that our shared sense of vulnerability to Winter reveals our intimate dependence and relationship with the natural world around us: “the universe itself had a prior intimate rapport with the human as the maternal source from whence humans come into being and are sustained in existence.” If our perceived source of existence changed from the universe to the mechanical, are we now in greater rapport with machines than with nature?
In a passage ominously prescient of the circumstances affecting many in the southern United States currently, Wendell Berry (not to be confused with, nor related to Thomas Berry) foresaw how the shift in the rapport between humans and machines leaves us more vulnerable than even our land-based Ancestors to the encroachment of Winter, as we have few cultural coping mechanisms beyond machines:
“If, for example, there should occur a forty-eight-hour power failure, we would find ourselves in much more backward circumstances than our Ancestors...Such a calamity (and it is a modest one among those that our time has made possible) would thus reveal how far most of us are now living from our cultural and economic sources, and how extensively we have destroyed the foundations of local life...If we note that much of the difference we are talking about can be accounted for as an increasing dependence on energy sources that are centralized, undemocratic, filthy, and expensive, we will have completed a sort of historical parable.”
I appreciate W. Berry’s optimism that the current situation is a parable whose lessons will be heeded for future resilience. Millions of people have been left vulnerable in communities of concrete, steel, and glass to determine for themselves how they survive when the life-support systems of our industrial age fail: reactors, power plants, generators, and pipelines. The earth's natural life-support systems can do little to help us in such times, in such environments where they have been all but blocked-out.
In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson reminds us that the Earth’s life-support systems surround us, and that we should not succumb to the illusion of grayness and bleakness of the Winter sea as lifeless:
“In the sea, as on land, spring is a time for the renewal of life. During the long months of winter in the temperate zones the surface waters have been absorbing the cold. Now the heavy water begins to sink, slipping down and displacing the warmer layers below. Rich stores of minerals have been accumulating on the floor of the continental shelf—some freighted down the rivers from the lands; some derived from sea creatures that have died and whose remains have drifted down to the bottom; some from the shells that once encased a diatom, the streaming protoplasm of a radiolarian, or the transparent tissues of a pteropod. Nothing is wasted in the sea; every particle of material is used over and over again, first by one creature, then by another. And when in spring the waters are deeply stirred, the warm bottom water brings to the surface a rich supply of minerals, ready for use by new forms of life. Just as land plants depend on minerals in the soil for their growth, every marine plant, even the smallest, is dependent upon the nutrient salts or minerals in the sea water.”
Carson helps us to understand Winter as a necessary cycle of loss to prepare for the next season of accumulation. In so doing, she fills in a multitude of spaces where people once drew blanks about the depths of our oceans. Carson profoundly changed our understanding of the aquatic underworld, while at the same time preserving some of its mystery to inspire an even greater sense of wonder. It is this space between the rational and the mysterious that cemented her influence not just as a scientist, but also as a writer who inspires people to see and interact with the world differently.
The Shape of Winter Dreams
As Kimmerer reminds us, Winter is known as a hungry and dangerous time. Land-based cultures winter in small family groups, not villages, to decrease their vulnerability. By spreading out across the land during the lean times of Winter, they require less from each place. In Winter months, the Anishinaabe tell the cautionary story of the Windigo roaming the north woods on freezing nights, who Kimmerer describes at length in Braiding Sweetgrass:
“With arms like tree trunks, feet as big as snowshoes, it travels easily through the blizzards of hungry time, stalking us. The hideous stench of its carrion breath poisons the clean scent of snow as it pants behind us. Yellow fangs hang from its mouth that is raw where it has chewed off its lips from hunger. Most telling of all, its heart is made of ice.”
The Windigo becomes more ravenous the more it eats. Kimmerer finds evidence that the mythology of this fearsome creature quickly spread during the fur trade when overhunting brought famine to Indigenous villages. “The ever-present fear of winter famine is embodied in the icy hunger and gaping maw of the Windigo...Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind.” Kimmerer suggests that the parable of the Windigo is to encourage negative-feedback loops in the minds of listeners—to be sated by balance rather than to continually seek out more in a path of insatiable hunger that no amount of growth can fulfill. Resisting our inner Windigo is the way to individually and collectively survive Winter.
I found parallels in the writing of Kimmerer and Barry Lopez in suggesting the importance of imagination for surviving the hardships of Winter. In Horizon, Lopez describes his experience in the Arctic with the Thule people:
“Anthropologists and archeologists I’ve asked speculate that in winter darkness Thule people slept for hours on end. Conceivably these long slumbers opened up large dreamscapes, which might have functioned for them like the cycles of myths they listened to in difficult times from an isumataq or an angakkuq (shaman)...In the long night of winter, did their dreams become longer, more elaborate? Was there such a thing as a summer dream? Was the dark a teacher or was it an oppressor?”
Lopez becomes intrigued with the question of whether the very process of biological wintering and its natural effects on our sleep patterns opens up different types of consciousness. There is a body of research that shows our natural sleep patterns, left unaltered, fall into multiple four-hour cycles with a few hours of lucidity between. It was only with the advent of artificial light and industrialization that the idea of uninterrupted eight-hour sleep cycles became the norm, so as to conform to the demands of machine time. In this alternation, we abandoned the thinking time between sleep cycles, typically awakening straight into preparing ourselves for the day’s productive cycle.
In the darkest days of Winter, the Thule people expanded the length of their dreamscapes, which Lopez contends opens them to:
“a conversation between imagination and intellect, one that might produce an advantageous vision, one the intellect itself cannot discern and which the imagination alone is not able to create. Lying by the karigi on Skraeling some nights, I wondered whether Thule dreamers, like the women and men who abandoned their umiaq at Kølnæs, rediscovered the thread of their resolve in the narratives of their winter dreams, both the intention and the means by which to make another sort of life.”
Here Lopez asks us to consider the very space of our Winter dreams, wherein the interplay between the rational and imaginative mind, we can strengthen our psychological resolve to not only survive Winter, but also to prepare for when life renews come spring. Lopez admits to situating his tent next to the karigi (the space the Thule people used for ceremony) in hopes that ghosts there would enter his dreams. Instead, what he found himself dreaming about was travel corridors in the land, and returning to his own narratives—“axes of allegiance and betrayal, of fulfillment and longing.”
Lopez was wintering. But, as he came to realize, just situating one’s tent next to another way of living does not change the way one dreams. Ways of being only change by living in actual rather than proximate relationship to Winter.
Conclusion
“On land we know that the apparent lifelessness of winter is an illusion. Look closely at the bare branches of a tree, on which not the palest gleam of green can be discerned. Yet, spaced along each branch are the leaf buds, all the spring’s magic of swelling green concealed and safely preserved under the insulating, overlapping layers. Pick off a piece of the rough bark of the trunk; there you will find hibernating insects. Dig down through the snow into the earth. There are the eggs of next summer’s grasshoppers; there are the dormant seeds from which will come the grass, the herb, the oak tree.”
As Rachel Carson describes, all the symbols of life are there even in the most dormant and hidden states of Winter. By peeling back the protective layers, we can find the vulnerabilities waiting just below the surface for the seasonal turn. The preparation for spring comes in the fall and rests through the Winter. Seasonal cycles adapt not only to preserve life through Winter but to change life in the other seasons in tandem.
We have come to depend on machines to protect us from the hardship of Winter. We attempt to defer Winter or negate it all together through our built structures, energy systems, and illuminating technologies. While we can try and mask our vulnerabilities to Winter—to deny that it is a time of hunger and danger—Winter eventually has its way of finding us to feel its full bite. As Katherine May says, when that happens, “it ravages us.” May also says that Winter can be an invitation to Somewhere Else.
“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can't quite keep pace.”
Where will you find your Somewhere Else? You still have time. For a while longer, it’s still Winter.
Go forth and make a difference in the week ahead.
Adam
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Why I Write The Understory
We have crossed the climate-change threshold from emerging to urgent, which demands a transformative response. The scale of the issue demands not only continuous focus but also the courage to take bold action. I've found that a persistence of climate consciousness improves resilience to the noise and distractions of daily life in service of a bigger (and most of the time invisible) long-term cause.
The Understory is my way of organizing the natural and human-made curiosities that capture my attention. Within the words, research, and actions of others lies the inspiration for personal and organizational journeys. I hope that my work here will help to inform not just my persistent consciousness, but yours as well.
Thanks Adam, a timely article that gives us all a wise nudge to look at the winter that surrounds us and see it in a different light. It urged me to make a paradigm shift from looking at winter as something to overcome, suppress or negate to looking at winter as Nature's own way to recharge, rebuild and ready itself for growth in the coming new year. Winter is a necessary quiet time that we can all use to likewise prepare ourselves for each successive spring. We must acknowledge that we are an integral component of the rhythm of the natural world and embrace it.
First congratulations on reaching Issue Twenty!
This issue's tone matches the pace and feel of Winter, and is a great reminder of all we have misplaced (not lost, simply not remembered). "Our cultural loss as an industrial society is that we no longer gain meaning from natural surroundings. " This is that high-context culture Tyson Yunkaporta talks about, as opposed to a conceptual-homogeneous culture. Context is fostered and the way all may best thrive is through strengthening those connections and by increasing diversity.
Regarding what we have forgotten, I was completely unaware of the information conveyed in your passages from Rachel Carson about the levels of sea temperature depth variations in Winter. How marvelous to consider the layers of the ocean rising and falling like blankets of currents, alternating between covering and consolidating the minerals and nutrients, and then stirring them upwards to where they are needed in the spring. The beautiful and intricate Sargasso ecosystem of My Octopus Teacher comes to mind.
Somehow I knew before I even reached the section that you would visit the Wendigo. The Accidental Gods podcast I was listening to last night with Manda Scott was retelling this story, in context of the apparent infection of our entire society with this cultural virus. The request was for us to wake up from our somnolence and to become the active agents of our own healing.
On dreaming - I'm resonating with the concept that dreams change with the seasons. My own dreaming has shifted dramatically since last Summer and Fall, when I experienced an incredible outpouring. Even my dreams seem dormant in these months of Winter.
I'm in love with the invitation to Somewhere Else!