This isn’t about you getting fixed,” he said. “This is about you living the best life you can with the parameters that you have.

Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

I’m tired, inevitably. But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough. And my house – my beloved home – has suffered a kind of entropy in which everything has slowly collapsed and broken and worn out, with detritus collecting on every surface and corner, and I have been helpless in the face of it.

But a prayer, at least, is something that happens silently, in secret. It is nothing that I have to advertise or discuss, and so I am able to be discreet about it, disingenuously hanging with the rationalists while I furtively seek the numinous. This urge towards ritual is something new and altogether more risky, because it makes my invisible devotions visible.

I wonder if I am perhaps a little too beguiled by this, whether my sense of malaise is actually a lifestyle choice, an urge towards homely perfection to soothe the turmoil that until recently has lurked in my life.

Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.

I’m feeling the full force of the guilt of being unable to keep up, of having now fallen so far behind that I can’t imagine a way back in. That grinding mix of grief, exhaustion, lost will, lost hope. My only tenable position is to retreat into a dignified silence, but that’s not what I want at all. I want to give an account of myself, force everyone else to understand.

The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it. You can’t have one without the other.

We may drift through years in which we feel like a negative presence in the world, but we are capable of coming back again. We can return to friends and family not only restored but capable of bringing more than we brought before: greater wisdom, more compassion, an increased capacity to reach deep into our roots and know that we will find water.

It often seems easier to stay in winter, burrowed down into our hibernation nests, away from he glare of the sun. But we are brave, and the new world awaits us, gleaming and green, alive with the beat of wings. And besides, we have a kind of gospel to tell now, and a duty to share it. We, who have wintered, have learned some things. We sing it out like birds. We let out voices fill the air.