Wintering My Practice: What I’m Reading This Spiritual Winter
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Wintering My Practice: What I’m Reading This Spiritual Winter
I’m in that weird Brooklyn winter where the light comes down around 4:30 and I’m arranging roses that smell like iron and damp earth. As a florist, I get asked to make things bloom. As a former molecular biologist, I know most of what I’m doing is water, sugar, hormones, and cold shock. As an energy healer, I also feel the room slow down when I put my hands on someone’s chest. That tension is where I live now.
So when you ask for spiritual winter reading, I don’t want books that promise instant glow-ups. I want books that make silence feel useful.
My list is small. First, Kathryn Mannix’s Wintering: The Power of Silence if you can get it. It’s not mysticism in the flashy sense, but it helped me stop treating my low season like a failure. It made me think of winter as a time for metabolic repair, not just emotional collapse. I read it in a way that felt almost biological: rest is not the absence of work; it is work happening below the surface.
Second, James Hillman’s The Soul’s Code. I’m not a Hillman scholar, but I keep returning to his idea that a person’s life has a pattern, a daimon, a stubborn grain. For me, that hits hard in winter. When I’m tired, I don’t need another productivity framework. I need to remember that my life has a shape, and part of that shape is going dark. I think Hillman is useful here because he doesn’t flatten the soul into a checklist.
Third, if you want tarot without turning it into a personalized identity system, I’d look at Robin Wood’s The Tarot: Image and Comment. I like it because it treats the cards as archetypes, not as a mirror that tells you who you are. In winter, that matters. I don’t want the deck to flatter me. I want it to show me where I am contracting, where I am waiting, where I am learning to be less available to the world and more available to myself.
That’s the shape of my winter reading: less expansion, more maintenance. Less asking what I should become, more asking what I am allowed to stop doing for a while.
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