hibernate

retreat, rest, read, repeat

Jan 14, 2025

As many of us do, I’ve got my hang ups about resting. Of course I love to wile away the hours reading, munching, coloring or otherwise lounging but the label ‘lazy’1 is always hanging over me like my own personal raincloud. Probably seeded by the Protestant work ethic, the demand to be productive is insidious and constant. Even when I do fit some rest in2 my mind keeps working to tally up the score — how much did I accomplish = how much rest I earned. But who even makes up this formula!? I did xyz work so carry the y, minus the z and divide by x = 1 hour nap! Wtf. I also fall into the habit of thinking about all the other busier people3 I know who actually deserve this rest I’m taking so the down time gets flavored with a big side of guilt. blegh.

But! I’m working on shifting narratives, on dismantling fundamentalism wherever it appears in my life and on asking ‘who does this benefit?’ and if I actually want them to benefit. After all, I am my own boss and shitty bosses are the worst. I want a pure, relaxing and rejuvenating rest for others so I need to want it for myself too. I want to change my perspective around rest from something earned, taken only when absolutely necessary to something cyclical and wholly relished when its time comes. I don’t want to feel guilty about resting, about my rest not being productive enough4 or that if I enjoy it too much I’ll turn into a sloth5 and never accomplish anything ever again. 6

Viewing the cycles of things is helping me here. Winter is dark, cold, often wet and sometimes ugly— it is a season for retreat, rest, hibernation, finding spots of warmth in the cold and light in the dark. Spring will come eventually and there’ll be time for sunny frolicking, romping and carousing then but for now, I’m trying to wholeheartedly respect Winter’s demands and check myself when I revert into too much of a checklist attitude. Like just this morning! I was cranky that audio7 I was expecting to work on today wasn’t actually ready for me. I needed to work! I needed to DO! I have the time and what use is my time if not producing something!?! After smacking myself in the face, I finally listened to Winter’s call to sleep in then sip my coffee, finish my book and stare out the window a bit.8 After all, God gives sleep to those he loves right Protestants!?

Today’s books delve into rest and sleep in various ways. In one sleep is a sickness, infecting people against their will. In another the oblivion of sleep is pursued at any cost. And in the final book, rest is encouraged and celebrated as a necessary part of the life cycle.

Some afternoon as the dark descends, curl into a couch corner with a soft blanket and a mug of something hot as you embrace the slow season with one of these.

THE DREAMERS by Karen Thompson Walker

When a college student falls asleep and doesn’t wake, it seems strange but not alarming. Until another falls asleep and another. Soon this “mysterious, persistent” sleeping virus is spreading throughout a small town and its inhabitants are left to grapple with the infected and those who remain awake. Following multiple characters, this dips in and out of the lives of a single father and his young daughters, a professor with a newborn, an out-of town specialist and two college students who are coming of age during a time of immense uncertainty which will reveal their truest nature to themselves and others. Little is known about the infected except they are “as if drowned in a dream” and their brains are recording an activity level never before seen in humans. Even when some of the sleepers begin to wake up, it becomes clear that the lines between dream and reality will never be the same.

I don’t usually go for books that follow multiple characters, I find it can dilute the emotional weight but not here. Here, small snippets carry big feelings and even just skimming this again to prep for this post, I felt more moved than with some of my recent full length reads. The tone is wistful, nostalgic and yes, dreamy but never dopey. Beautifully written, it is also fairly eerie at times with ominous teases of the future that are unsettling but damn do they keep you reading. The light/dark and sweet/bitter and science/philosophy combinations felt very human and connective as each character struggles with being stripped down to their barest self while forced to watch loved ones succumb to the peaceful, yet horrifying, vulnerability of sleep.

This is fastidiously imagined, well paced and engrossing with an immediately graspable mood, tone and setting and includes an apocalypse in miniature with a pandemic, drought and wildfire all within one town. The empathetic, moody atmosphere is well matched with each character’s external/internal struggles and the whole thing is hopeful yet harsh, filled with the sweet bitterness of life and love of all kinds.

I was even more fascinated to re-visit this book after living through our own global pandemic— the conspiracies, rules, unknowns, shortages, rumors and sense of bewilderment were right there at the tip of my own memory and I loved the inclusion of science, theories and tales around dreaming and sleeping. It felt mythic and mystical at times but always grounded in true, messy human experiences. Time is a big theme here, as well as truth, memory, reality, consciousness and the self, how they all tangle together in chaotic, uncontrollable ways. It made me want to re-watch Arrival9 actually.

"Please," he says, his hands on her chest like he might still find some magic there.

"Please, wake up."

There is a reason that time seems to slow down in moments like these, a neurological process, discovered through experiment: in times of shock, the brain works faster-it takes more in. And so, some might say that this-the increased rate at which his neurons are firing-makes these first few seconds even more excruciating than they might otherwise be.

But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.

WINTERING by Katherine May

Katherine May presents the season of Winter as “a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order” and this book explores the concept of the season as a verb— to winter during the dark, cold, liminal season is to revel in retreat and rest in the hopes of eventual renewal. She writes about the radical yet essential act of slowing down and the transformational power of communing with Winter instead of fighting or just getting through it. What does it look like to be friends with Winter instead of enemies or passing acquaintances? Beginning with Prologue: September and ending with Epilogue: Late March, the chapters are divided by month and filled with essays as May reflects, wrestles, plays with and succumbs to the various aspects of Winter in her personal life along with its wider concept.

May’s voice is peaceful, wise and cozy though not without some dashes of snark to keep it from falling into the saccharine or Hallmarkian. Of course, she’s fairly privileged and as much as we wish it, not everyone has the luxury of retreat and rest, but I found her to be quite human in her meanderings, challenges and emotional excavation. She recounts personal stories of professional upheaval, illness and burnout along with explorations of tales, fables and folklore intertwined with her own traipses of curiosity in wintery realms. She weaves together stories of animal migration and hibernation10 with activities like making preserves, basking in the northern lights and the Blue Lagoon and explains the ways the northern countries navigate, prepare for and interact with Winter. I enjoyed following her journey as it led from solstice celebrations to mediations on bees, from a St. Lucia’s Day service to her own plunges into the frigid sea. I found her thoughts on light, its presence and absence then vs now, to be poignant and lovely, never preachy or too “self help-y”. This book is a thoughtful digestion of ideas and an exercise in finding the ways we can reconnect to our human rhythms and instincts, to notice and honor them instead of ignoring, controlling or dominating them.

There is not enough night left for us. We have lost our instincts for darkness, its invitation to spend some time in proximity of our dreams.

I find this idea of welcoming and living within cycles to feel feminine and witchy so I want to be on the lookout to identify and welcome cycles and seasons when they occur in my own life. My favorite section in the book was her experience with cold plunging. She presents some research on its benefits but mostly gathers personal stories and shares her own experience cultivating the habit of a morning dip in chilly waves, its effect on her body, mind and mood as well as how it eventually created a community.

I haven’t done anything close to her extremes, but just this past November I did work up to one play through of All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) [From The Vault]11 in my in-law’s pool which was about 58 degrees12. The first time I went in I lasted like 30 seconds, screeching and flailing all the while. But the next time I changed my approach and kept absolutely still up to my neck, just breathing deep and welcoming the cold. It would end eventually so I wanted to be brave enough to just sit with it, feel it until it did. And it was cold! painful! and hurt my lungs for about the first minute. But after that I really didn’t feel very cold! I couldn’t believe that I enjoyed it13 and in just a week or so actually got sort of addicted to it. I was proud of myself and my body, doing something uncomfortable and challenging. It felt earthy14, new, bracing and quietly powerful and I was delighted to impress my own self. I’ve got a friend15 who does this the Sound many mornings, which is much colder than 58 degrees but I’m thinking I’ll try it out with her sometime… stay tuned.

Winter is when I reorganise my bookshelves and read all the books I acquired in the previous year and failed to actually read. It is also the time when I reread beloved novels, for the pleasure of reacquainting myself with old friends. In summer, I want big, splashy ideas and trashy page-turners, devoured while lounging in a garden chair or perching on one of the breakwaters on the beach. In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight—slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION by Ottessa Moshfegh

In New York City, in the middle of the summer of 2000 our 26 year old nameless narrator, “plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body”, decides to hibernate. With the ‘help’ of a randomly discovered ‘psychiatrist’ she medicates to stay asleep as long as humanly possible16 to detach from the mundane realities of life and hopes to revert to a sort of default setting of blankness and purity, to begin anew. Though outwardly she’s ‘got it all’, she’s grown so angst filled and apathetic with every aspect of life that she decides her only recourse is an extreme escape into the dark, nothingness of sleep in the hopes that when (if?) she finally wakes up, she will at last be able to cope in this world. That is, as soon as she can accurately distinguish reality from dreamscape.

This is definitely not for everyone, so if you aren’t into ‘unlikeable’ narrators probably best to skip this one. This is a dark comedy with a fable like17 quality in its broad strokes but it also grounded in real human concerns. After all it takes a lot of admin preparation to sleep for months and stay alive, pay your bills, eat, hydrate and have clean sheets once in a while. Told in first person, the events18 mostly take place during the hibernating period but we’re also treated to flashbacks to fill in some backstory about our narrator and her familial traumas, terrible relationships and attempts at adulting. The few side characters are uniquely terrible yet fairly realistic with her doctor’s particular zaniness bringing levity to some dark material. I loved the narrator’s ‘night vision log’19 shenanigans which were funny, depressing and wildly inventive.

Darkly humorous, tragic and weird, this gets absurdist towards the end as she goes to some intense levels of avoidance in her hopes for passive regeneration and we’re left to wonder if she wants completion, transcendance or deletion. While I never had the desire to sleep away a year, I can understand her craving a hard reset. You know like, “oh, this isn’t working? Have you tried turning it off and back on?” I can understand the wish for a return to factory settings, a chance to meet life’s demands pure and unblemished, free from baggage, fully rested and raring to go. But, oof. The danger in rest as avoidance, instead of recovery shouldn’t be ignored. This isn’t a book for everyone, but I enjoyed its tone, its wacky premise, its cutting observational wisdom and even ended up caring for the bratty narrator during this trip of a story.

This was good, I thought. I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then-that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.