There are things you learn late in life, or at least past childhood. I don’t mean the sobering, earth-shattering revelations—the buried family history, the long-held lie. I mean the other kind, the small ones that you might have taken for granted. The ones that, when you learn the truth, set you just a little off-kilter. As if the ground suddenly shifts a few inches.
For most of my life, I thought hibernating animals fell into slumber for months on end. I pictured a black bear huddled in its own fur deep underground, breathing long and deep, nose twitching while snow fell outside. I realize now that I never asked anyone how it knew to wake up, what signal called it back from the depths.
January is tricky for me. I’ve had a bit of a vendetta against this first month of the calendar for some time: I always seem to collapse inward. Sometimes there are culprits to point out—a nasty bout of laryngitis that left me voiceless for a month, a spate of grey brutal cold, missing my friends’ New Year’s parties to work alone in the city. Sometimes the month itself just creeps over me, fog over a harbor. It feels like a trap, some inexplicable waiting period before I can pull myself free and live out the year.
I envy the hibernators. There have been many moments in my life (too many in the last year) where I’ve thought, or even said aloud, Can’t I just fall asleep until things are better? I want to descend into the murkiness of dream, and only wake in a sweeter situation than the one I’m leaving behind.
It is snowing as I write this—wet, pillowy flakes the likes of which New York rarely sees. The sky is flat, grey of rubbed-out graphite. A draft pokes its fingers through the gaps in the window frame. I haven’t been outside for days; I spend most of the daylight hours wrapped in layers, sitting in one place.
As it turns out, hibernation is not the Sleeping Beauty trance I thought it was. The body signals of a hibernating animal certainly point to that: its heartbeat, breathing, metabolism, and body temperature all slow or drop. Life suspended. Bears in particular are what some scientists call “super hibernators,” able to sleep without eating or passing anything for up to a hundred days. But for most, the slumber doesn’t actually go unbroken for months. Hibernators will often sleep, then wake and move around to warm up, then sleep again, and repeat the cycle. No one knows why they do this.
When I learned this, I felt momentarily, inexplicably betrayed. Why wake when there is nothing out there? I thought. The truth exposed my wishes for what they were: evasion, escapism. Still, I have to admit something about it makes sense to me. So far down, barely breathing, it would be easy to forget the world outside. It makes sense to me that something inherent and primal says, Wake up. Just for a while. You need to remember why you’re down there at all. You need to know when to come back.
There is a crucial difference between this January and many of the ones before: I am working. I’ve made something I am proud of, and now I am doing all the drudgery I usually avoid, to make sure this thing comes into the world steady-footed and full-voiced. I’m still pandemic-unemployed, I have the time. My trusty tea mug gets rinsed and refilled every few hours. I don’t speak, much of the day; I forget to answer texts until I remember, and then I have little to say, because I am working.
I think about the black bear of my dreams, burrowed deep into the belly of a tree somewhere miles from my never-silent street. I think about how much I would like to sleep until something—or some part of me—blooms.
This waking slumber of mine has a deep hold, and sometimes I sink in a little too deeply. I obsess over a vague sentence, a sound out of place, an image cropped wrong. Sometimes the trance turns ominous, suffocating: the fear that I am doing all this work for nothing. The fear that I will do everything I am supposed to, and emerge in a new season, but the bushes will be bare. That no one will care. That I will have slept like a bear, only to starve like one.
But maybe this is what happens to hibernators, too. Something in them senses the danger in being too far gone, heartbeat going faint—and it jolts them back to life, to warmth. Wake up. Just for a while.
A dear friend has the words “Solitude is enriching” inked into her skin. True to her word, she recently spent ten days in deep woods and mountains, passing through towns only when she had to. It was good to be alone, she told me, but by Day Ten, she wanted to talk to someone. She chose her own hibernation, but something in her knew when it was time to come up for air.
I am trying to remember that this time is valuable. So much of winter (and especially this one) is about surviving, and I want to do more than that. But it takes time and energy to put yourself and your work into the world. So even when I feel like I am doing nothing, I am doing something. I just can’t see the shape of it yet, because I am still working, still asleep. I am still down below, but I am coming up for air when I can.
I hope wherever you are, whatever you are focused on right now (and it can just be yourself and your health), that you are too.
Parting notes—
These articles by National Geographic and the Australian Academy of Science helped me unravel the phenomenon of hibernation in the animal kingdom. This one from The Guardian explores the concept of hibernation from a human perspective.
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