(FREE) March Letter from the Editor
by Kelsey Wagner
The following Letter from the Editor appeared in the print issue of Ponca City Monthly magazine. Get full access to all online articles, videos, and content by becoming a paid subscriber. We offer free and paid subscription plans. Find rack locations to pick up your free print copy here, or subscribe here to get online access plus exclusive content.
Well, folks, it’s been a long, dark sludge through winter. We’ve been surviving on a less-than-ideal amount of sunlight for the last four months and some of us are really feeling the effects of its absence. For these reasons and many others, I’ve never particularly liked winter. We all can relate to that feeling when the sun sets at 5:45 pm. When your work day is over at 5 pm, and it’s dark by 6 pm, somehow it feels like time for bed by 7 pm. The winter months have a way of slowing us down, and can, when we let them, steal some of our joy. It’s very easy to begin to feel hopeless in winter like the sun might never shine again. When the sadness creeps in we are scrambling to find ways to feel more joy.
Last year I read a book in the very midst of winter called “Wintering,” and it really changed my negative views of winter. Instead of a time that is dark and dreary, it explains how winter is simply a reflection of life as it truly is - imperfect and sometimes sad. Winter brings a different kind of joy than spring sunshine. Winter is solemn and quiet – a time of rest and of reflection. It’s a time to slow down and be still.
In life, there are events and seasons that are fun and exciting and there are other times of sadness and sorrow. Katherine May, author of: “Wintering” said, “Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.”
I think that’s such a beautiful concept. She continues, so poignantly, to illustrate that learning to embrace winter is similar to learning to embrace our own sadness. And that it’s not something to be ashamed or afraid of, it’s simply another part of who we are.
Katherine writes, “If happiness is a skill, then sadness is, too. Perhaps through all those years at school, or perhaps through other terrors, we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the practice of allowing ourselves to feel it as a need. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.”
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