Hello Ramblers,

It’s the 387th day of January, and the Met Office need only copy-paste the weather report each drizzly day. 

We aren’t the first generation to endure the seemingly stagnant weeks of winter; the power of myth has long bolstered humanity through its most vulnerable moments. The halfway point between the winter solstice and spring equinox has many names, and even more stories: Candlemas, Imbolc, Saint Brigid’s Day, Groundhog Day. Across the northern hemisphere, cultures mark this threshold in different ways: Chinese New Year, Tu Bishvat, Setsubun, Sadeh. 

And yet, shared narratives don’t always hold us in our personal winters. I don’t know about you, but my social media feeds quickly shift from “New Year, New Me” to lamentations over a pile of abandoned resolutions. It’s a familiar tension: the simultaneous pull toward change and resistance against it. We don’t have to resolve that tension straight away. We can stay with it and see what begins to take shape.

The quickest way to escape that discomfort is to avoid it by either pushing on relentlessly or by giving up altogether. But what if we stayed with the discomfort and allowed it to simply exist? What if we met that tension in the middle? We can notice the need for change while tempering the pace with intentionality, patience, and perseverance, rather than burning out when the initial spark of new beginnings fades. 

It’s from this perspective that I invite you to wander through the author’s exploration of Darkness and Hunger in January. There is nothing to fix or fear. We are merely noticing, and staying with, the early vulnerability of change.

Darkness

Let’s recap. Our hero moves through their ordinary world until something interrupts it. In fear, they resist and falter. They begin to accept their new reality and adapt, carrying trepidation and a growing awareness of themselves. Where we last left off, our hero crossed the threshold of their learning edge, believing themselves ready for what comes next. Now, in darkness, we are immersed in the visceral ephemerality of relief as our hero is put to the test. This is the part of the story where we don’t yet know what anything means, only that we’re in it. 

For Katherine, this period of wintering is rooted in her pregnancy: a time shaped by vulnerability, physical change, and the limits of control. Her fertility journey brings unexpected challenges, and she finds herself resisting the reality of what her body is asking of her. So she does what many of us do: she carries on. She embraces the cold, seeking the light again in the aurorae of Tromsø. 

There seemed to be so many wonderful permutations of the auroae, but all of them were fleeting, as if the line between your hopes and reality was unclear.

The literal and metaphorical Januaries of our lives can feel much the same. We remember ourselves in the pockets of warmth and vibrancy throughout the festive season, but once the candles burn lower, those moments are replaced by an acute awareness of our vulnerability.  We know how to find the light, but we also notice how easily we fall back into old habits as the cold bites harder and time stretches on. 

May asks us to surrender to this in-between. To trust that we will learn to see the light again, or, when it has abandoned us altogether, to trust that it will return, as it always has. 

In the meantime, we might hold close the stories of the Sámi people, following the “ragged-antlered” reindeer, “wearing their resilience like a crown”, only to shed the tools they’ve grown when they no longer serve their purpose. Or we might picture Katherine accepting a warm bowl of soup from her hosts, allowing herself to be held, rather than enduring alone. There is something here about letting our communities protect us when we feel most exposed to the elements. 

In darkness, our hero is generous with her vulnerability, staying with discomfort, learning to accept it for what it is, and even allowing others to tend to it alongside her. She doesn't need to make sense of it all in the moment; the meaning and purpose will follow.

Hunger

Katherine leans deeply into metaphor in this section of Wintering. It may feel elusive at the outset, but if you stick with it, something begins to settle. The mythology of the wolf is steady and enduring. Again and again, we return to it as a way of understanding our inner lives. 

If darkness asks us to stay with discomfort, for our inner wolf to lie in wait, hunger asks us to notice what we yearn for while we’re there.

Whenever we want to denote the hunger of the cold season, we turn to wolves. They are the enemy we love to hate, offering us a glimpse of feral intelligence. Their morality is mutable. They do what they have to do. In the wolf, we are offered a mirror of ourselves as we might be, without the comforts and constraints of civilisation.

Hunger, in this sense, is not just physical. It emerges wherever there has been lack. It is natural, even necessary, but it also leaves us exposed. When we are hungry enough, we are less discerning. We reach for whatever might fill the void. May goes on to tell a cautionary tale of wolfish hunger whose ending is not so satisfying as fantasy or fable, but is a parable rich in compassion, understanding, and wisdom all the same.

Life never does quite offer us those simple, happy endings. I often think that it’s all part of my own craving: the moral clarity of cause and effect, reward and punishment for my actions.

Often, what we long for is clarity: a sense that if we do the right thing, things will resolve cleanly. But winter and hunger rarely work like that.

We will meet our wolf in winter. We will both resist it and, at times, give in to it. The work is not to eliminate it, but to listen to what our inner wolf craves and hold its fear alongside its ferocity. May closes the chapter with a call to action: respect your inner wolf, for it will endure either way. 

When we think we’ve learned enough to move forward, it’s worth remembering the step that sits between insight and action: integration. This is where we test our mettle by remaining with what’s still unfinished. We meet our darkness, our hunger, our vulnerability. And we practice responding differently. We cannot control what winter brings. But we can use the season to understand ourselves more deeply, and tend to our vulnerability with both honesty and care. 

Perhaps the end of January is where we begin to settle into acceptance. We’re not going to finally “get it right” or completely transform ourselves with the resolutions that fell by the wayside weeks ago. But, when we allow meaning to emerge from where we actually are [ unfinished, tentative, still in process ], we make room for all parts of ourselves: the darkness, as well as the light. Myths remind us that this stretch of winter has always asked something of us. They help us rewrite our modern story: one where the long, grey days are not evidence of failure, but part of a slower unfolding; where broken resolutions become information, not indictment; where hunger and darkness are not problems to solve, but experiences that shape us. If wintering teaches us anything, it’s that in time the story shifts, not because we forced it to, but because we stayed.

We don’t need to carry this any further today. What’s been stirred can settle in its own time. I’m not sure whether the rain will give way to the sun by the next time we meet, but maybe that’s okay.

Until then, take good care as you pause, ponder, and wander.

See you on the next page,

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Note: Rambling Reads is a reflective reading series and is not a substitute for therapy or medical support. This is a space where my love of stories meets my work in understanding them.

Cultivating Community: Whenever possible, I encourage borrowing books from your local library or a friend. If you’d like to keep a copy on your shelf while supporting independent bookstores, you can use my affiliate links to Bookshop.org to help keep this ramble going.