Wintering Through

“Only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”

                                    — Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

There are other phrases in Rilke’s haunting Sonnets to Orpheus that have lifted me into surprise and exhilaration, but “wintering through” was the phrase that gave me pause as I made my grateful way through the poem this time. “Überwinternd” in German—bless the Germans for making one word of it—because they recognize that something is lost when prepositions are divorced from verbs.

My husband likes to quote the adage, “The way out is down and out.” The way out of self-defeating self-deception is through the shadow. The way out of fear is often not to avoid it, but to move toward the fearsome thing. They way out of the hardest things is through a tunnel where they seem to grow harder and darker. Finding the way out requires a trust that is willing to do the counterintuitive thing—don’t cheer yourself up but grieve more deeply; name the losses; tear your garments and sprinkle ashes on your head. Sit shiva. Read words of lamentation. Enter the depths from which the Psalmist wrote his de profundis and Mozart his “Dies Irae.”

The way out of physical pain, I learned when in the worst years of migraine attacks and in the hardest hours of childbirth, may be to go into the pain, like diving into the great wave. If you dive, you rise and float. If you resist you are tumbled onto the beach, scraped and choking.

The way out of the bleak grey of not quite clinical depression—those seasons when energy ebbs and everything visible fades to shades of grey—was, for me, to listen to a chorus from Brahms’ Requiem, “Behold, All Flesh is as the Grass,” or to Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” or to the second movement of Schubert’s “Quintet in C Major” where violin and cello seem to call to one another with slow, tentative hope, moving upward from a quiet, somber place where they begin.

I do not want to be glib: there are dangers in going through rather than circumventing or suppressing or avoiding suffering. But sometimes it is a place of valuable discovery—of one’s own capacities and resilience, of the paradox that the “unbearable” may be borne, of the availability of spiritual presence or aid. “Wintering through” can stretch the heart—or so Rilke believed, and I believe him. It is a seasonal metaphor that implies expectation and promise and waiting for things to take their time. In those winter seasons the mysteries of germination, hibernation, and preparation are happening, however well or poorly we recognize them. To enter into those mysteries with full consent may allow what comes to be not an agony of endurance but a gracious unfolding.