Winter Friends

The complexities, and necessity, of friendship. The second installment of a weekly series of essays and writing prompts for finding connection and creativity during the month of February.

Two feathers, found exactly like this while on a walk with a winter friend.

As regular readers know, I’ve devoted a lot of words these past couple of months to the topic of creative winter, thinking about what a darker, colder time means for the creative process.

Part of that seasonal process is retreating inward, sinking into more space for rest, finding the quiet that serves as a background for contemplation and rumination.

This retreating makes it so easy to take an individual view of this season. I know I do. I want to rest and retreat, pull back, not engage as much. Even as spring peeks its head out over the horizon, planting little reminders for me that things are shifting—the first nettles appeared last week, it’s not pitch black at 7am anymore, I am dreaming about putting nasturtium seeds in the soil—I still feel tired. Still in need of more rest, more hibernation. Maybe some of you feel that as well.

I’ve noticed in recent online workshops that people don’t quite participate as much as before, at least not on camera or with their voice. But they want to be there, be with other people, even just virtually. It could be induced by the season. Or it could be another cycle of our post-pandemic world, in which we still crave a deep sense of community, but often, feel too tired to show up.

Back in November I was reading an old issue of the Country Living magazine (UK edition, clearly), and there was a page with a picture of a farmer on a tractor in the snow, being followed by a border collie. Please cue “All Creatures Great and Small” emotions. There was some line about the value of a “winter friend.” I didn’t write it down, and I didn’t take a picture, so I have no memory of the sentiment that was penned, but the term “winter friend” stuck with me.

For me, winter friends are friends who can be together in the quiet. Friends who allow you to be, and don’t demand that you do. There is no performance to the act of being winter friends, you simply are. Winter friends weather the fallow periods of friendship, they listen, even if all you have to communicate is silence. Winter friends are rooted, weathered. Even just the knowledge that they are there can help to ground you.

“A winter friend knows my greys, my perennial complaints, vain woes, and does not paper over my doldrums. Knows my laments and stands beside them—a contrast, a reprieve,” my friend Gretchen wrote to me when I asked her what came to mind when she heard the term. “A winter friend puts tea in my cold hands and believes I’m good even when my thoughts are harsh like a scraping storm or hard like frozen ground. A winter friend is dependable, here again and here again. A companionable candle when the days are short.”

A winter friend is a friendship you can sink into. It is reliable, makes you feel tethered.

“We are good winter friends, because we know how to have fun in the snow or rain, or general bleakness,” Roshni texted back to me when I asked her. A winter friend helps you find light in the darkness, not in the offering of advice or the suggestion of how a situation might be remedied, but by simply being there. Warmth and support held in the same moment as the bleakness, the light offered without the burden of demands.

A winter friend knows how to be comfortable in doing nothing.

From a series of papercuts last year

It’s no surprise to anyone that we struggle with friendship as adults, particularly those of us in our 30s and beyond. A decade into that “beyond,” and I certainly feel that. For one, several close friends are physically far away, which really has no easy remedy. Closer to home, it’s difficult meet new people, to create the kind of connections that can allow the space for that kind of easy and supportive coexistence. Despite the amount of connectivity that would seemingly make it easier to do, it often feels like you need an administrative assistant to coordinate schedules. Or you feel like the one always saying, “I can’t.” It’s difficult to gather when people are pulled in all directions.

Above all, it’s difficult to gather when we’re tired. As

Rosie Spinks

wrote in her excellent piece on friendship: “We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we simply don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and lifeforce back.”

A newsletter from The New York Times dropped in my inbox recently with the headline “Why don’t we hang out anymore?” and I was immediately annoyed—mostly at capitalism and work culture and the American structure that has always prioritized work and productivity—but also maybe even a little annoyed at The New York Times too. I took offense at this claim.

“Really, we don’t know how to hang out anymore??” I shouted out my computer screen.

“I do plenty of hanging out with fr—

…

Oh. Wait. Ok fine.”

Mostly I’m annoyed that “couch friend” is a thing on social media. Because, of course, everything needs to be a Thing these days. When you see How to Be a Couch Friend on the bestseller list 9 months from now in an airport bookstore, don’t be surprised.

In my twenties, my friend Rachel would often swing by the Thai restaurant down the street and show up at my house with takeout. I’d open a bottle of wine, and we’d sit there eating pad Thai (yes, on the couch, this was back when “couch friends” were just called “friends”) and discussing nothing in particular and everything of importance. We didn’t cram these dinners in between other things, and they didn’t require weeks of scheduling, they just happened. The casualness of a different age, a different era.

I actually put “casual hangs” on my “More” list back in January, after some friends invited my husband and I over on New Year’s Day for no other reason than to be together. There was laughter, a board game, a beach walk, and later a dance party—only allowed in the afternoon as I was instructed by my 4-year-old friend who spent the time aggressively dancing on the couch. It felt spacious, generative, the only time constraint the sunset which would mean biking home in the dark.

Part of our inability to prioritize this kind of space is cultural. We live in a country that resists idleness, and we frame so much—sometimes even friendship—through a lens of productivity. Think of how a “work date” is valued versus “hanging out.” (And yes, I love a good work date.)

But we are also burdened by our expectations of perfection, of putting on a version of our lives that presents well. I remember a discussion from many years ago with my friend Polina—a celebrated cookbook author, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Republic of Georgia during the collapse of the Soviet Union—about how rare it was with a lot of American friends to have casual hangouts. We talked about how “just come over,” felt like a big ask for people. There was no space for saying, “yes of course come by, I’ll see what I can dig up,” and finding a chunk of cheese in the refrigerator and putting it out with a bowl of nuts or some other thing that could be nibbled, calling it a day, and then just letting time extend.

Instead, gatherings around an American table often require elaborate meals and place settings, the exhausting act of putting on friendship instead of being in it with what you have. Just look at how many step-by-step directions and even books there are to make boards (cheese or otherwise): perfectly styled for social media, but instead of a catalyst for more socializing, a catalyst for the presentation of being social. If we’re tired by the thought of gathering, part of it might be the expectations that we’ve put upon it in the first place.

In my twenties, I had a group of friends who would regularly gather for some version of Ladies’ Night. We’d usually all bring something, so that the person hosting didn’t feel too much pressure. Regular hang outs, with snacks. The location would change, the support did not.

Eventually, I moved across an ocean for a few years, and couldn’t make it to in-person Ladies’ Nights anymore. One time I Skyped them early in the morning, the 9-hour time difference meaning that I had coffee in hand while they all had glasses of wine.

A few years ago, one of those friends, Jude, got divorced. She texted that same group, asking for in-person emotional support the day she was moving out of her cherished home and into a new apartment by herself. “Of course we’ll be there,” was the resounding response. I made the three-hour drive early in the morning. I remember two things about arriving: it was foggy and the first thing we did was hug. No words, just a hug.

The collective strength that day wasn’t required to move the physical load, it was for the emotional one. Afterwards, thanks to an early spring day when the sun decided to shine, we sat outside at a Mexican restaurant and cheers’d to whatever would come next. “To low maintenance, high yield friends,” exclaimed Jude, raising her glass.

It’s like my Executive Board¹. We live many miles apart, but there is no question that we’ll show up when need be. Our text chain is a lifeline. We will brainstorm and approve ideas. We will challenge each other. We will plot and scheme. We know we’ll hang on the couch eventually, and while I’m currently late on getting back to them about when we can do our next in-person hang, I know they don’t hold it against me. The simple knowledge that the social scaffolding is there is sometimes enough to feel supported and held.

Which is not to say that work and maintenance aren’t required, that everything is always smooth and easy. After all, “friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction,” writes Spinks. It is the process of friendship that sustains us, not the end product. Sound familiar to creativity anyone?

I moved back to my hometown a little over eight years ago. It’s a rural town, there aren’t many places to go and gather. Without children, making connections with people in my age group has not always been easy. It has taken nearly a decade to re-establish some roots, create friendships that feel like they could be on their way to becoming winter friends.

What a small town lacks in events and amenities, it makes up for in “weak ties,” a concept I intuitively felt but didn’t know the term for until

Wendy MacNaughton

wrote about it. These are the social connections that sustain us beyond our immediate family and closest friends. These kind of ties were significantly impacted during the pandemic, yet they are an essential part of our social connectedness and wellbeing. It’s why a smile from a stranger does us a lot of good and why social isolation comes at a significant cost.

For me, that’s the conversation with the people who work at the post office, the librarians who know my name and therefore do not need to scan my library card. Now this is my version of luxury.

It’s making a little joke with the person working at the checkout at the grocery store. It’s sitting at the outdoor table at the local café every Sunday after a bike ride, inevitably running into someone I know. None of these feel like work, they tend to serendipitously take place, woven into the daily schedule. Sometimes when a conversation at the library goes longer than anticipated, I’d even go so far to say that I feel like I’m… wait for it… hanging out.

Last year, a few fellow friends and I decided to establish a little creative “salon,” a very specific space to come and talk about creative ideas and projects. A container for showing up with our creative selves. Something we were craving in our small town. We have only done it a handful of times so far (after all, scheduling comes with a lot of friction), but when we do, the parameters set around our gathering allow us to enter into a more vulnerable place. One where we can share, yes, and feel heard, and seen. But also, and maybe more importantly, a place where we have the time and space to deeply listen.

I was thinking of that space when I read a Rebecca Solnit quote recently, from her essay “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunication in the Silicon Age,” in the 2014 book The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

“Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.”

A decade later and it doesn’t feel like things have gotten much better, we seem to have little time for solitude or communion. We’re stretched thin in the unsatisfying space in between the two.

I think about this a lot, particularly in a modern age when we spend our days sharing, projecting, chattering, but it often feels hard to find deeper modes of connection, whether that’s to each other, or even to ourselves.

To listen is an act of attention. To listen is to be with the world around you, to be with someone, to be with yourself. Or as Kate Murphy writes in You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters: “listening is about the experience of being experienced.”

Maybe that’s exactly what a winter friend is. Like the quiet and dark of the season that beckons to us to listen to the natural world, a winter friend is one who can be in the quiet right along with you, attuned to something deeper. A friend who meets you wherever you are in your experience of being a human, who calls to you to pay attention.

Someone with whom you can listen, together.

-Anna

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Every week this month we’re exploring a writing prompt in conjunction with Freeflow Institute, all dedicated to connecting to the the cold.

Last week we focused on getting outside and writing a sentence a day. Today we’re shifting our focus a little bit, as the Freeflow challenge for the week is to explore the cold with a friend, which is what planted the seed for the essay above.

The cold and dark can make us feel the pull of hibernation, to retreat from the world around us. While we may go inward in the darker months, cold has always been a collective affair—humans need each other to be able to survive, particularly in frigid temperatures. As much as winter may ring of solitude, it’s a call for connection. To reach out to a friend, to check in, to gather. To not go through the darker days alone. We’re not the only ones who need each other—many animals huddle together in winter to stay warm, like penguins.

Our prompt last week was for immersing in the cold and using it as a catalyst for paying attention. Today’s is similar in nature, a challenge to not just pay attention to the world around us, but also to each other and the connections that sustain us.  

As you explore the cold with a (winter) friend, here are some writing prompts to get the juices flowing:

• How does going inward allow us to extend outward?

• What does connection generate?

• Can we listen, together?

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HARMONY OF OPPOSITES CREATIVE WORKSHOP SERIES

This month’s offering for paid subscribers is a two-part creative workshop series: The Harmony of Opposites, taught in collaboration with

Kenshō studio

.

We had such a wonderful time gathering together, and I am looking forward to doing it again. Next session is Sunday February 18, 10-11:30am PT. You can still sign up, and you can catch the video replay of the first session on Light & Shadow.

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED ART SHARES!

I am doing another Community Supported Art share this year, basically like a CSA except that I send you art instead of fruits and vegetables. There will be two shipments, around the spring and fall equinox, and each one features a variety of printed art goods made by yours truly! This is the last week to sign up, deadline is February 16.

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SUPPORT

Essays and prompts like these are made possible by paid subscribers. I am working on another special seasonal offering for paid subscribers to come next month, and if you like this newsletter I’d be thrilled if you want to support. Sharing it with a friend (winter or otherwise) helps too!

Like what’s happening in this newsletter? You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, ordering something in my shop, attending one of my workshops or retreats, or buying one of my books.

High fives and notes of inspiration are also accepted, or you can share this newsletter with a friend.

1. This is probably worth an entirely separate essay, but yes, an Executive Board it is. Hi Rachel and Xochil, happy that you approve this message.